I accidentally disabled my menu bar and in an effort to make it reappear, I accidentally disabled my status bar. Pure madness. After shouting some four letter words that are exactly four letters in length, I figured out that each container has it’s own XML-based settings file that allows you to turn the menu and status bar on/off.
This example is based off of my Windows 10 Professional environment running Virtualbox 5.0.1. I am 99% sure that these instructions will also work in Windows 7. Please post a comment if this is wrong. I will also post an example for Linux at a later date.
Make Menu and/or Status Bar Appear in VirtualBox Container
Step 1: Close VirtualBox. You need to exit the application, not just your container. If you don’t close out of the VirtualBox application completely, your changes will not stick. You will be in an endless loop of doom…
Step 2: Locate your container’s config file. Browse to [Windows Drive]:\Users\[Username]\VirtualBox VMs\[Container Name]\ and locate the file [Container Name].vbox. Open with your favorite text editor(notepad, notepad++). My personal favorite at the moment is Sublime Text Version 3 Beta. Sidebar: Version 2 is stable, but I have been using beta version 3 and have not had any issues.
Step 3: Update options. Locate and change the following lines from false to true:
Step 4: Save and Re-open VirtualBox. Select and boot your container. You should now see your menu and/or status bar depending upon your selections.
Please comment if this helped, or if you have a suggestion.
Brilliant…Worked for me!!!!
THANK YOU! What a horrible product that you can’t click to undo.
You are quite right and this article is so helpful for me. Thank you.
By the way, I found another way to show bars again, (maybe as you’ve already known).
Shortcut key can be assigned in
Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager ( Launcher window) -> File Menu ->Preferences ->
Input -> Virtual Machine TAB -> Show Menu Bar/ Status Bar
For example, I tried to set Host+z and Host+\ for Show Status Bar and Menu Bar respectively.
And the launch VM and hit the shortcut then Menu and Status bar appear again on the screen.
Anyways, still it is not friendly for us.