To return ownership of keyboard and mouse to your host operating system, VirtualBox reserves a special key on your keyboard for itself: the "host key". By default, it is the right Control key on your keyboard on a windows machine and left Command key on a Mac.
I was tearing out my hair until I noticed that Ubuntu 16.04 puts menus not on the window but at the top of the screen (status?) bar. I didn't have the window maximized because I did not want to see excess white space, so the window has a bar also and that is where I was looking. :) noob moment of the day for sure.
I came here to find an solution and suddenly had the hunch that something was interfering with the guest window processing host keys. I turned out that I enabled the "Show postion of pointer when the Control key is pressed" checkbox. Disabling it fixed the problem and now I can switch from scale mode to full screen and seamless mode. Also have the mini menu back :)
Sooo... First use "Host"+"Home" buttons, next go to "view" --> "Full screen mode" --> now you are in the full screen mode and you have to escape from full screen mode and you will see the top menu bar. :)
Because you're in scale mode which causes it to be hidden.
Host + C is the toggle for scale mode (where Host is Right Control by default)
On Windows XP and Windows 7, as of Aug 2014, there's more to the story. To bring up the menu, and to be able to access all items on the menu:
I faced the same issue on my macbook pro and I found a solution:
(Source)
In case you don't find this line (like in my case) simply add this line.
On OS X you can find
VirtualBox.xml
in/Users/<username>/Library/VirtualBox
dir.Weird.. but you want to also make sure the menu has the proper options selected. so by.
make sure the options look like this.
solved.
do note.. if u don't see the menu after pressing Ctrl + home. try pressing ctrl + c then ctrl + home.
To return ownership of keyboard and mouse to your host operating system, VirtualBox reserves a special key on your keyboard for itself: the "host key". By default, it is the right Control key on your keyboard on a windows machine and left Command key on a Mac.
I was tearing out my hair until I noticed that Ubuntu 16.04 puts menus not on the window but at the top of the screen (status?) bar. I didn't have the window maximized because I did not want to see excess white space, so the window has a bar also and that is where I was looking. :) noob moment of the day for sure.
I came here to find an solution and suddenly had the hunch that something was interfering with the guest window processing host keys. I turned out that I enabled the "Show postion of pointer when the Control key is pressed" checkbox. Disabling it fixed the problem and now I can switch from scale mode to full screen and seamless mode. Also have the mini menu back :)
Sooo... First use "Host"+"Home" buttons, next go to "view" --> "Full screen mode" --> now you are in the full screen mode and you have to escape from full screen mode and you will see the top menu bar. :)
CTRL+C or CTRL+F won't work if the machine is paused.
You have to press CTRL+P to unpause, if the menu is hidden.