133

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.

image description

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

Franck Dernoncourt
  • 24,246
  • 64
  • 231
  • 400
Tomáš Zato
  • 4,790

6 Answers6

129

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.

Andrejs Cainikovs
  • 2,880
mercibe
  • 1,291
125

Open virtual machine's settings, then select the User Interface page. Enable the checkbox highlighted in the figure shown below:

Screenshot of VM settings window on User Interface page, with an arrow pointing to a checkbox on the top toolbar

Dave M
  • 13,250
gronostaj
  • 58,482
24

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.

enter image description here

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!

Manuel Jordan
  • 417
  • 2
  • 8
  • 20
Alexis Wilke
  • 1,806
3

Temporary removing of %USERPROFILE%/.VirtualBox folder with

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

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

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

from this tooltip

yevhen vitiuk
  • 31
  • 1
3

Step 1: open the Vbox preferences for VMs

enter image description here

Step 2: find the host key. In the example below, it is Ctrl + Alt.

enter image description here

Step 3: find the scale shortcut. In the example below, it is Host + C. Which means Ctrl + Alt + C.

enter image description here

As a result, Ctrl + Alt + C will show the menu, if it had disappeared due to the scale mode.

Franck Dernoncourt
  • 24,246
  • 64
  • 231
  • 400
1
  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.
Glorfindel
  • 4,158
masoud Afrakhteh
  • 31