USB flash drives on Windows XP guests

[wrkbear]

I have three systems all running Windows XP guests on Ubuntu 8.04 hosts. Two are intel P4 32 bit machines and the third is an intel core 2 duo running 64 bit Ubuntu and 64 bit VirtualBox. (The windows XP guest on all three machines is the same 32 bit OS.)

On the two P4 machines all USB devices work fine. (I do recall having lots of problems with flash drives early on, but they were fixed. Unfortunately, I have since forgotten how we fixed them.)

On the core 2 machine, all installed USB devices except the flash drives work fine. Virtualbox captures all the flash drives, but windows only detects some of them. (On the P4 machines, all the flash drives are captured and detected successfully.)

One of the flash drives is a BitWare 128MB flash drive. When I plug it into the core 2 machine, this drive shows up on my linux desktop as it should. When I capture the drive with virtualbox, the drive icon on my linux desktop disappears and the windows xp guest pops up a message saying "new hardware found" and "new hardware successfully installed". The flash drive can then be opened in windows explorer and can be read from and written to with no problems.

The second flash drive is a SanDisk 1GB flash drive. When I plug it into the core 2 machine, this drive also shows up on my linux desktop as it should. When I capture it with VirtualBox, the disk icon on my linux desktop disappears (just like the BitWare flash drive) and VirtualBox indicates that it has been captured. However, there is no "new hardware found" or "new hardware successfully installed" message from windows and the drive cannot be found with windows explorer. If I release the flash drive from virtualbox, the disk icon returns to the linux desktop and a browser opens and shows the contents. Recapturning the flash drive repeats the process. (A third flash drive (a generic) behaves exactly the same as the SanDisk, so the problem is not unique to the SanDisk flash drive.)

I would normally suspect that the SanDisk and generic flash drives were corrupted, but they both work fine on the P4 windows guests. So, why do some flash drives work perfectly well on one system and not the other, while others work perfectly well on both???

[wrkbear]

If this happens to you, check to see that each flash drive was properly unmounted from linux. Plug in the errant flash drive and after it mounts in linux, unmount it. Then unplug it and plug it back in again. Doing this allowed me to get all my flash drives working properly in the windows guest as well as the host.