Impossible to mount an external USB drive on an XP Guest

[cantaeus]

Hi everyone !

After a research on th VB forums, i have to admit that i found no solution for my problem.

I'm using virtualbox 2.1.2 on a Leopard host. In my virtual machine preferences (XP SP3 with last guest tools installed), i've activated USB/USB2 controller, and added my Wester Digital usb external hard drive.



I've unmounted it from the desktop of my mac, and started my virtual machine, but when it's started, impossible to mount USB drive, it's in gray ?



Does anyone can help me ? (Sorry for this bad english, i'm FR)
Sincerely

[tkwm]

Mount it under Mac-OS-X and set up a shared folder pointing to it.

[cantaeus]

Hi tkwm, and thank you for you're answer. I know i have this solution, but i'm looking to use Windows based ntfs driver to have the best performances in writing speed.

[aquarius]

please try again, stick to this sequence:

• have your disk not connected
  
  start VirtualBox guest
  
  connect your disk (it will be automounted by your Mac)
  
  "eject" your disk in the finder but leave it connected
  
  wait until the symbol for your disk really disappears in the finder
  
  now you should be able to select your disk in VirtualBox VM (using the Menu or the little icon under the guest window)

aquarius

[tkwm]

As far as I know raw disc access is at moment not working with vbox-mac.
Possible solutions/workarounds are posted here:

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=13446

On the other hand, the perfomance of the drive in meaning of transferspeed will be more limited by the usb-connection than by the hd-format.
But, a limitation that many people are not aware of, is the maximum filesize of 2GB under fat32.

[tkwm]

@aquarius
A ntfs-formated disc only will be mounted by the mac if one uses a ntfs-driver that makes the volume visible to the mac-os like fuse-3g or Paragons ntfs-driver. Mac-OS only mounts mac or fat32 formated discs.

[aquarius]

As far as I know raw disc access is at moment not working with vbox-mac.
Possible solutions/workarounds are posted here:

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=13446

On the other hand, the perfomance of the drive in meaning of transferspeed will be more limited by the usb-connection than by the hd-format.
But, a limitation that many people are not aware of, is the maximum filesize of 2GB under fat32.

Well, IMHO this has nothing to do with raw disk access, since it's USB device access in the eyes of VirtualBox. On my Mac I can use all sort of USB sticks and USB hard drives this way.

But cantaeus's problem may be that his disk is NTFS file system. If his Mac tries to mount it and is not successful, it will perhaps never be properly "released" and the last two steps of my suggestion will not happen...

This seems to be a common problem with all sort of "exotic" USB devices.
One has to "convince" the Mac to leave the device alone, so that VirtualBox can use it. OS X seems to "autograb" all sorts of devices instantly ...

[cantaeus]

@auqarius : as you read it in my first post, i had already done that, but thank you for trying to help. are youre ntfs devices formated in NTFS ?

@tkwm : i've already read this topic, but it's not bringing the solution i was looking for.
i'm using macfuse and ntfs-3g, so my writing speed limit on NTFS is quite low (6-8MB/sec). I really think that if i could mount my usb drive on windows, it would be really faster.

Thanks a lot for this help !

[aquarius]

cantaeus, please try this approach:

• power down and save your guest (to be able to edit settings)
  
  In the details tab of your guest check that the USB Filter you created for your disk is active (checkbox checked)
  
  power on your guest, log in etc.
  
  now, when you plug in the drive it should be "grabbed" and mounted by Windows, not Mac OS.

Please report if that solves your problem.

Could it be that it's so simple to deal with unwilling USB devices on the Mac!?
(But so unfunctional as well ... always having to power down and save the guest in order to change USB device host/guest preferences for devices you use in both environments)

[cantaeus]

As you see, everything seems ok, and at this step, hard drive is unmounted from macos.

But it's not working, even if i stop, update settings, delete and add again the device, and start the virtual machine

Thanks for help

[tkwm]

I would be interested to read the opinion from one of the developers regarding this problem, because it often will be asked and after trying this and that I use my usb-drive the way I described here (mount to mac and use shared folder).

[aquarius]

But it's not working, even if i stop, update settings, delete and add again the device, and start the virtual machine

very bad indeed. What happens if you unplug and replug the drive?
What happens if you mount the drive with fuse and unmount it?

... There must be a way to see what OS X does with the USB devices, like lsusb on linux ...

[jnf]

I spent the past few hours with this same issue and have just discovered a workaround:

1) Disconnect the USB drive altogether, then reboot your XP guest
2) Once rebooted, reconnect the USB drive

The XP guest should pick up the drive partitions rather than the host...

Hope this works for you too!

[zzgulu]

Thank you very much Aquarius for the hint, I spend my whole yesterday afternoon trying to mount my external usb drive so that I can restore my backed up partition with Acronis.

please try again, stick to this sequence:

• have your disk not connected
  
  start VirtualBox guest
  
  connect your disk (it will be automounted by your Mac)
  
  "eject" your disk in the finder but leave it connected
  
  wait until the symbol for your disk really disappears in the finder
  
  now you should be able to select your disk in VirtualBox VM (using the Menu or the little icon under the guest window)

aquarius

[ebonweaver]

please try again, stick to this sequence:

• have your disk not connected
  
  start VirtualBox guest
  
  connect your disk (it will be automounted by your Mac)
  
  "eject" your disk in the finder but leave it connected
  
  wait until the symbol for your disk really disappears in the finder
  
  now you should be able to select your disk in VirtualBox VM (using the Menu or the little icon under the guest window)

aquarius

This does not work. It causes the menu option for the guest to be disabled and the USB stick to re-mount in the Finder on the host. The guest must be restarted in order to get the options under the USB Device menu to return. It also causes virtualbox to think that the machine never stops, so you must quit virtual box and relaunch in order to restart the guest as it never leaves a running state. Adding the device to the USB filters causes the above behavior to simply occur at boot time, the drive is still not available to the guest and the menu becomes disabled. There seems to be a lot of bugs with this feature that cause USB drives to be completely unavailable in a guest OS.