How to enable USB on VirtualBox in Ubuntu Hardy
As I have seen heaps of topics now in regards USB and different problems, I deceided to post my solution which I have created doing a lot of reading through the all loved www.
It is now all working fine for me and I have experienced all problems, a lot of you guys have or had.
USB not there, USB greyed out, only working without USB 2.0 etc.This would be basically just a summarize of a few topics out of this forum. Please note, I don’t wont credit at all, as this is nothing else then a collection of different information I found.
The running host is Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) with a Windows XP SP2 guest. After successful installation I installed the client extensions to get the shared folders and a few other nice things running. USB turned out to be a bit of a pain.
1.) See if the host can find the USB device, in my case a SanDisk Mini Cruzer.
| Code: |
| tail /var/log/messages |
the output should be
| Code: |
| Jul 10 19:18:10 flobook kernel: [ 3538.186069] usb 5-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Jul 10 19:18:10 flobook kernel: [ 1326.842493] scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 3541.699637] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access SanDisk Cruzer Micro 0.2 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.141058] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 1000944 512-byte hardware sectors (512 MB) Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.145129] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.147862] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 1000944 512-byte hardware sectors (512 MB) Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.148866] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.148876] sdb: sdb1 Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.149942] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk Jul 10 19:18:15 flobook kernel: [ 1328.149991] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 |
Ubuntu started mounting that stick immediately and so there is no problem so far. But VBox didn’t really wanted to play with me.
The manual tells something about the /proc/bus/usb/devices which unfortunately didn’t exist for me. The final answer there was on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#USB
First step there is to enable the running user to access the /proc/bus/usb by typing
| Code: |
| sudo chown -R root:vboxusers /proc/bus/usb |
Afterwards I opened up the /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh and changed a few lines which were out commentated and added the group ID of my vboxgroup
| Code: |
| # #Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work # mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0644,listmode=0644,devgid=xxx ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb |
while xxx is the group ID. You can find this by typing in
| Code: |
| sudo cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers |
As this still didn’t work, I had a look back again in the troubleshooting of the original manual and added according to this, following line in the /etc/fstab
| Code: |
| none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=xxx,devmode=664 0 0 |
while again, xxx is the group ID.
I decided to do a restart after all those changes. Maybe not necessary but sometimes even on Linux a good idea.
Then I started up VBox and under USB I had my MiniCruzer and I created a filter for it. On a startup, I was able to see it under USB devices, but unfortunately it was greyed out. So I switched off the guest, changed to USB settings , deactivated the USB 2.0 controller and started up the guest again. Finally I had it. Windows started initializing and after finishing, a reboot was requested (of course). After reboot my stick was there and fully accessible. I did another shut down, switched on the 2.0 host controller in settings and started the guest up again. It now looks perfectly fine.
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