I hid the menu bar in virtual box, how to show it again?

In top menu bar, I accidentally selected to hide that top menu bar ("File", "Help", etc).

As the bar has disappeared, I now cannot access the option to show it again. Not very thought through in my opinion.

How do I show it again? My version is 5.0.4r.

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5 Answers

Open virtual machine's settings, then User Interface page. Check this box:

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You can access the menu while the VM is running by Right Control + Home (by default). It will pop up as a contextual menu through which you will be able to reactivate the display of the menu.

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I had a similar problem where the menus & status bar were gone.

The Host + C fixed the issue. Why?

Looking at the list of hotkeys (From the menu: Input » Keyboard... » Keyboard Settings...), the Host + C is assigned to the Scaled Mode function. The feature that let you change the size of your guest window to whatever dimensions you'd like (it does not even have to be a standard 4:3 or 16:9). This is great, but the side effect is that the VirtualBox system removes the menu & status bar because these may not fit properly when you resize your window in that mode.

So hitting Host + C again fixes the issue because it gets you out of the Scaled Mode. Now they can be sure that the menu & status bar will fit your window as expected.

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Note: by default the Host key is the right Ctrl key. That means if you have the habit of using that right Ctrl in your day to day usage (like editing a file), you could end up triggering a VirtualBox guest feature without knowing it... some of which could be a shutdown or reboot of the guest!

Temporary removing of %USERPROFILE%/.VirtualBox folder with

mv %USERPROFILE%/.VirtualBox %USERPROFILE%/.VirtualBox_old

and starting a virtualbox from scratchallowed to solve the issue with the help of

hotkeys(Host+C & Host+Home, where Host=Right Ctrl)

from this tooltip

1. Just move the .VDI file out of the folder made by VirtualBox (otherwise you will delete it by mistake)
2. Go to the VirtualBox manager program and delete the profile made for the virtual operating system by right click on its icon and selecting delete all
3. Try to recreate the virtual box but this time use existing .vdi file and the rest just same.

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