mpack wrote:Methinks that would be me.
It would
- and joking aside you're certainly not wrong, but this a fairly exceptional use case and (we agree) it would be unwise not to treat it as such.
Rather than write pages of advocacy, I'll offer a rule of thumb that people can take or leave as they see fit. If you're just moving files and file content from A to B, use a system designed to move files and file content. Once you start dealing with something as a block device, treat it uniquely as a block device.
Mixing the two takes you into expert territory, which is somewhere you really don't want to be unless you are one.
> Also my experience is that Windows gets upset when you insert a host drive which has an alien filesystem on it.
Ah, thank you: I knew I'd missed one.
> However... (this comment intended for future readers, not the OP): if the purpose of formatting the SD card is for (say) a Raspberry Pi or similar, then there are Windows host tools that will perform that task quite easily. No need for VMs or formatting in a separate step, just copy a ready-made image using Win32DiskImager.
Agreed, but there's a critical detail here I touched on in my original reply. Writing an image is fs-agnostic, i.e. it's just block use. Accessing - and especially, manipulating - the *content* of that image once written is an entirely different story, especially once you start bringing host/guest capabilities into it. While many users can indeed get by with just the first part, being able to do both has immense value, and a captured adapter really is the only sensible way for a normal user to handle this particular scenario.
(To take a recent real-world example, Ubuntu's Pi image is missing HW RNG support, but is recent enough to use the "new" unified /dev/(u)random. On a headless server it thus hangs at boot indefinitely, waiting for entropy that will never come from a mouse that is not attached).
Which, regrettably, brings us to OP's continuing problems, which have managed to go from "Well, it's Byzantine, but yeah, it should work" to "erm,
what?!"
I've done my time in embedded. I drove to a store one afternoon to buy dozens of SD card adapters for almost this exact purpose years ago: no-name plastic USB 2.0 junk at about $3 a piece, distributed to five different development teams running at least four different OSes on a dozen different machines. All of which Just Worked, because that is literally the point of USB! :/
I think I'm rapidly becoming suspicious of this really being a VBox problem. I'm not running 7.x myself, but ISTM staggeringly unlikely that not only has your old approach ceased to work properly but you also can't interface with a trivial USB device. Not impossible, but not particularly credible at this point either. If I was in your position, it would be time to boot from an Ubuntu ISO (and/or even a different PC entirely) and start bisecting from there. Something here just doesn't smell right.