Virtualbox how to enable USB on Guest OS

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@YP

I’m running Xubuntu 18, so I’m running a linux OS.  I can mount devices on linux without any issues.  My issues is that I can’t get Windows 10 pro guess OS to see a flash drive.  I have installed extension pack as well as guess additions.  Shared folders work fine but no luck with usb device.

Any suggestions or comments.

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The User has previously posted additional information about this issue.

anonymous wrote:

System is: icore 5 [5th generation, I believe]; 8Gb Memory; 256Gb SSD; touch-screen. I noticed the keyboard is flaky; but I only paid $400 with tax.

Anyways, I blew away the OS and installed Xubuntu 18, basically Xfce desktop. I just installed virtual box with Win10 10 Pro V1803. I just changed defer options following instructions from previous postings here.

Please see the additional information in #243372.

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@YP, call me WanderingLamb. I was not going to reply because I do not believe I will be able to help you completely. But I want to move this along if I can.

@YP, by “guess OS” do you mean “guest OS”? As in calling the virtual machine (VM) installation of Win10 within the VirtualBox a “guest OS”.

Also, it is clear the flash drive cannot be accessed. Are all input ports that you expect to appear, listed in the device manager for the VM Win10 OS? Are other USB devices “seen” when connected to that particular USB jack? These questions are trying to establish if the problem resides in the VM, in the hardware, in the driver, or in the flash drive.

Expressing these two points more clearly may get more help offered.

Hope this helped. — WanderingLamb

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In order to be able to assign USB devices to the guest, you will have to add a user group to Linux called “vboxusers”, and add every user you want to be able to use USB devices in VirtualBox.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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@YP

Ascaris,

Thx for responding.

Installed vbox is 5.2.18, and using xubuntu 18

– download “Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.18.vbox-extpack
– Went to File->Preference->Extensions:
clicked on “+” found extpack file
– installed above Vbox asked for linux authentication before installing extpack
– sudo usermod -aG vboxusers myuser
– sudo grep vboxusers /etc/group
vboxusers:x:127:myuser

I believe that I’ve done all the actions. I plugin a flash. Linux/host OS loads the flash correctly; but windows/guest OS sees nothing.

I’m relatively new to using vbox; am I missing something?

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You have to let VirtualBox know that you want to assign that device to the VM.  While the guest is running, open the VirtualBox menu and select Devices, then USB.  You should see a list of the USB devices available on the PC (if the user is not in the vboxusers group, nothing will appear here).  Check the device(s) you want to give to the VM, and they will then be available in the VM (Linux itself will report them as disconnected).

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Ascaris,

I see usb devices listed in VM. The usb list makes sense for some items: touch screen,
logic tech usb (mouse), webcam. When I connect flash drive, a new item shows up on the
list; however, linux mounts the device. When the device is disconnected, item on usb list goes away.

When I look at Device->USB->USB settings:
– The Enable USB controller is gray out
– I see USB 1.1 controller is selected

Don’t know if info is useful. Do I have the correct extension pack?

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You see the devices in the “devices” menu momentarily when you plug it in, but then disappears immediately from the list when Linux mounts the device, is that right?

There’s also a helper you can install on the Windows guest to enable more functions within the VM (guest).  In the Devices menu, if you see the option to insert the Guest Additions CD Image (as you can see in the screenshot below, at the bottom of the menu), select that.  If you do not see the option, you can download the Guest Additions image from Oracle and mount it as a virtual CD from the VirtualBox UI.

After that, you can go into File Explorer in Windows and select the virtual CD drive and install the Guest Additions.

If you’ve downloaded and installed the restricted (not free/open source) extension pack, USB 2.0 and 3.0 should be available (assuming the PC has USB 3.0 capability).  You’ll have to shut down the VM to be able to change the settings to enable it.

I just tried it with my Win 7 VM under KDE Neon (Ubuntu 18.04 base), with the restricted extension pack and guest extensions installed, and as soon as I plugged in the USB drive, it was automounted as expected.  With it still mounted, I went to the device menu in VirtualBox, and it showed up immediately:

It’s been a while since I first tried VirtualBox… now when I set it up anew, I automatically install the guest additions and the restricted extension pack, then set all the guest options, before I use the VM, so I don’t remember which bits were necessary to make USB thumb drives work.  Maybe the guest extensions are necessary for this (the Device Manager in the guest would show a ! next to the USB controller until the driver was installed).  I’m using a Windows 7 guest, though, which is a little different, since Windows 7 does not have native USB 3 support.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Ascaris wrote:

You see the devices in the “devices” menu momentarily when you plug it in, but then disappears immediately from the list when Linux mounts the device, is that right?

Not the original poster but that sounds familiar.

… yeah, for this and a whole lot of other “advanced” usages I really recommend turning off the automatic mounting of hotplugged filesystems, you usually have such a setting available somewhere. My current Xubuntu setup isn’t in English so don’t know offhand what it’d be called for you… and I’m still on 16.04 anyway.

It’s also possible to unmount but not detach a device. Some desktop environment designers feel that this is unnecessary complexity for the basic user so you may have to use the command line to do that, don’t remember offhand which way Xubuntu is … mine’s set to not automount because in a number of important cases I’d start with “dd conv=noerror” anyway, instead of a mount.

Then there’s the other way to do it if you have shared folders working – just share /media/ or wherever it is that those get automounted for you. (IIRC, the shared folder setup in VirtualBox does follow mounts under it by default.)

Ascaris wrote:

There’s also a helper you can install on the Windows guest to enable more functions within the VM (guest). … …
If you’ve downloaded and installed the restricted (not free/open source) extension pack, USB 2.0 and 3.0 should be available (assuming the PC has USB 3.0 capability). You’ll have to shut down the VM to be able to change the settings to enable it.

I believe the original message said that guest additions and extension pack were already installed?

BTW, the VirtualBox restricted extensions licensing is a real bother for some things… Anyone know of a way to buy that in reasonable numbers for an individual or a small business?

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ascaris

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To the OP… if you run VirtualBox as superuser, does it work then?  If so, it’s likely a permissions issue.

mn– wrote:

I believe the original message said that guest additions and extension pack were already installed?

Very true, but I was trying to cover all of the most likely issues that would cause USB to be stuck at 1.1, and in that process, I overlooked that bit.

I tried accessing my USB drive mounted (via the usual automount) and unmounted but not stopped, and it was accessible (as shown in the screenshot) in both cases.  I use KDE, and I don’t have any Xfce setups to try this on (I do use Xfce on my <1GB RAM single core laptop from around 2005, but I don’t think it would be a good candidate for hosting a VM!).  As far as I know, the mounting is handled by udisks on Ubuntu and derivatives, so how much depends on the desktop environment, I do not know.

mn– wrote:

BTW, the VirtualBox restricted extensions licensing is a real bother for some things… Anyone know of a way to buy that in reasonable numbers for an individual or a small business?

The restricted extensions are licensed free to personal users, at least at the FAQ level, but I am guessing you know that, so I am further guessing there are some exceptions (too many machines, perhaps?).  Oracle seems to think that all users fall into personal (subject to whatever restrictions), education, or enterprise… no mention of small business or personal users whose use goes beyond the terms of the free license.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Ascaris wrote:

The restricted extensions are licensed free to personal users, at least at the FAQ level, but I am guessing you know that, so I am further guessing there are some exceptions (too many machines, perhaps?). Oracle seems to think that all users fall into personal (subject to whatever restrictions), education, or enterprise… no mention of small business or personal users whose use goes beyond the terms of the free license.

Well yeah. Any use for commercial activity runs into the limitations of the free license right away, as does installing it for use by anyone other than the person who does the download and install even if the use would otherwise be covered…

And, Oracle normally only sells the commercial license with a minimum quantity of 100, which is a bit much for the small to very small business.

Oh well, QEMU-KVM and Hyper-V don’t have this particular problem…

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@YP
I disabled auto-mount on linux side and the flash was not mounted when it was plugin.  On window 10, guess OS, I do see a new item added, which is listed as an unknown device with hex numbers.  Actually, I was seeing this before disabling auto-mount.  The behavior seems to be the correct driver is missing from window 10, guess OS.
Ascaris, we are running the same Linux base system.  The difference is the desktop.  I believe we are using the same version of Virtual Box V5.2.18.  Clearly, USB feature works, so I must be doing something wrong.  I’ll have to do more research.
Since this is a test machine & configuration, I really don’t have to get all things working immediately.  My goal is to see whether I can live with win10 running in virtual box.

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FYI: The correct terminology is GUEST not guess in the virtual machine. Linux is the HOST and Win10 is the GUEST.

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PKCano wrote:

FYI: The correct terminology is GUEST not guess in the virtual machine. Linus is the HOST and Win10 is the GUEST.

Surely you mean Linux..

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Fixed that!

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@YP

Sorry for  misspelling

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