virtualbox.org

I reverted to Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha and VirtualBox 1.6.6, because the latest and greatest of each defined my attempts to set up Windows 2000 Pro up to SP4, or let me install Office 2000 Pro (some problem accessing AW.DLL from the install disk). At least with the earlier versions of both, I knew this would not be a problem. But the later versions of both also let me work with existing VDIs, so I might turn around and upgrade later.

I Enabled USB support in Ubuntu (same method as reported for version 7.10, so just search on Ubuntu Enable USB for articles on the how to do this). And several USB devices showed up when launchjng VirtualBox and checking Settings, but for some reason the mounted External Hard Drive was missing. I searched on line for an answer, and tried everything I read, but no luck. When I went back to basics, with a "none" addition to tabfs, it finally showed up. So far so good, and the guest OS could access it.

But I have more than one PC and external drive, and strive both to do backups and exchange major files between the PCs with the external drives in different configurations and as there is available free space. So I tried a second external hard drive with the same PC, and it does not show up either (a different drive manufacturer is involved). I don't want to agonize my way through this hold process again, so wondered if I could get some targeted replies that might take me right to a solution.

Incidently, I tried installing Windows 2000 Pro up to SP4 and Office 2000 Pro on every VirtualBox 2.x (everything after 1.6.6), and it bombed on every one. That, and the fact that I could not get guest screen resolutions beyond 800x600 or any support for graphics mode, are the factors that drove me back to the earlier release of VirtualBox. Maybe they will fix these problems in future releases.

Aa to Ubuntu 9.04, it did fine on giving me access the the latest NVidia drivers, which work fine, but does not automatically recognize and use the NVidia toolbox when adjusting the video output, and you have to use gksudo nvidia-settings in order to store changes to the xconf file. And the Root Terminal goes as far as asking for a password, then just disappears, ao you have to log into a normal Terminal console and enable root priveleges there with sudo <command> or just sudo -s (if you want to remain in super user mode for additional commands).

Ahhh.... so what is your question?

Wasn't it apparent? How can I get any external USB drive, once mounted by the host system, to then be enabled in VirtualBox for use by the client? I managed to get VirtualBox to let me pass a link to a Fantom 500 GB drive, which always shows up in VirtualBox whether connected or not, but now I am trying to get it to do as much for an Ultra 250 GB drive or any other. The host system sees them all, whenever one is connected, but VirtualBox seems to be a mite fussy.

You create a blank filter in the VBox GUI.
Then start the guest and once started plug the USB device in.

Windows 2000 doesn't have that many drivers for USB devices as XP and Vista have. You probably need it's driver. Check the device manager for any devices that need a driver update.

Hmmm. That's interesting. I wondered what those options to set up a blank filter might be fore. I will give it a shot. I was trying to left click the second icon on the right when setting up USB pass thrus, as I learned to expect the USB devices on the host to just show up, and I would click the box of each to be passed through. The notion that the first Icon might help in a case like this had not occurred to me. After all, I did not know what information to put into the blank fields in a blank filter, and just figured it was a way of setting things maually if you had the right information in hand (It would help a mite if some of this was a bit more obvious).

As to any USB drivers for Windows 2000, don't kid yourself. Windows is nearly the equal of XP in such matters (many times drivers and such are marked for 2K/XP, or you can use a driver marked just XP with Windows 2000, and it works just fine). The trick is though, is that some software installs require XP SP2 or 2K SP4, or if it just asks for XP SP2, you can still slip through if you have 2K SP4. The one notable exception is Microsoft's Media Player, that ends at version 9 for 2000, and goes to 10 with XP. But heck, someone had to prove somehow that XP was better than 2K. Oh yes, and the other little thing: Windows 2k's Installer is only able to work on drives that are limited to 137 MB, but after you figure out a way to get it installed, you can add and set a entry called EnableBigLba in a certain place in the Registry, and then it can work with large capacity drives as well. The XP installer already has that capability set for it (another way of proving that you needed to upgrade).

Ah, problem solved for me, starting first with the notion of using a blank filter, then when that did not work on its own, I went looking for other information about such things as venderid and productid, even took my external drive out of its case to get the nomenclature from the drive housing. I was still hung, until a search with Google took me to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-341740.html. Reading though it I found some interesting command line commands and displayed results that got me where I was trying to go.

The first command is listed as lsub. This is a typo, as no such command exists. The correct command is lsusb, and this gives you some pertenent information, but does not really give you enough to do the job. The right command for this purpose is VBoxManage list usbhost, done in terminal mode. The results match up with what you need to fill in a blank filter to access the device.

One thing I added was to turn off the device you want to add, do the VBoxManage list usbhost command, turn the device back on, make sure that the host OS sees it, then do the VBoxManage list usbhost command, and the difference in the two listings is directly related to the device you want to add to the filter. In fact, the returned information is exactly what is needed to enable the device (note that the first figure shown is not the one you want, you want the one in the (parens), which is the hexidecmal form.

One thing that still bugs me about VirtualBox is that after you enable USB in the host, you always get a generic mass storage device (0100) listed under USB settings in VirtualBox. I have no idea what this is or why, but it cannot be accessed, because it does not exist. Just a distractor, I guess.

Another thing is that the drive information was of no value here. The reason is that the system is actually talking to the USB to IDE or USB to SATA bridge or controller installed to manage the drive. That is the information needed, and in my case, it turned out to be something called Prolific Technology Inc. ATAPI-6 Bridge Controller. Who would have guessed?

Oh, the information abut setting up a user group called usb? I'm not sure that is at all necessary, but it won't kill you if you decide to. But make sure you are enabled in the vboxusers group, and for your add-in entry into /etc/tabfs, make sure the devgid= value is the same as that assigned to the vboxusers group. They sometmes forget to mention that, but it is important. The other thing is that when you check the vboxusers group, you will already see your username and root entered there. But you have to put a check mark in the box before the name, otherwise you are not really included. These names only show up in every group since they are the only ones that can be enabled in any group.

I guess that covers it pretty well. I write these things out in detail, not just to help others (and I do hope that they help), but to help me somewhere down the road if I have to go through all this again, and don't want to figure it all out from scratch.

This one is mostly solved, but I wonder if someone might comment on the reason for a generic mass storage device (0100) always showing up, and what good it really does.

Re: USB Working But External Drive Not Showing Up

Postby Perryg » 11. May 2009, 13:57
You create a blank filter in the VBox GUI.
Then start the guest and once started plug the USB device in.

Does "guest" refer to the OS?

I tried that with no apparent luck.

Dick

Yes, "guest" is any OS installed on top of a VM (Virtual Machine) Manager, such as VirtualBox. And the VM Manager is itself installed on top of the booted OS, commonly referred to as the "Host". So the host is any OS that you are capable of booting your PC up with, but has to be actually installed on a read/write media such as a hard drive, so a liveCD would not suffice. The reason is that the VM Manager then has to be installed on that, and after that, it has to be instructed on how to set up a virtual partition for the Guest, and then you have to do an additional install of the Guest OS on that partition.

How much memory does this require? I found that you could have a fairly decent install if you have at least 1 GB of RAM and perhaps 8 GB of disk space. since a good sized guest OS might take at least 4 GB. But if you plan to do much with either the host or the guest, then additional RAM and much more disk space is probably in order.

Ubuntu does not automatically mount attached partitions and USB attached external drives. It can, but depending on several factors, may be prevented from doing so directly. But if they are there, they should show up under Places/Removable Media. However, VirtualBox does not come with USB support enabled. To fix this, you have to make certain file changes, but information on doing this is readily available at several sites, so I won't bother repeating the process.

You also have two choices for installing VirtualBox. One is the OSE version, which does not support USB either, and the other is the commercial product, but free to the individual to download and use. That does support USB, and their are several prebuilt versions for different Hosts and versions. You will be notified that you have to enable users in the usbuser group, but you also have to make an entry addition in /etc/fstab to have the host scan for USB devices, and how to deal with any found. Additionally, you have to uncomment or add some lines to a script file: /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh.

That should be it, right? Not quite. The people behind Ubuntu want to make sure that you have the right permissions to mount and use the other partitions and external drives. When you try under /Places/Removable Media, you may get a request for your user password. Then the mount can happen. If you want to avoid this requirement, it means another change to the /etc/fstab table, which is to add ",user" in the options area, meaning that in many cases this portion may now appear as "defaults,user".

Oh, I guess I should add that many of these changes do not take place until you restart the host. Since the mount point for anything classified as Removable is generally the /media folder (and each mount point must be a folder put here beforehand, usually with a mkdir command, and also designated exactly the same way in the /etc/fstab file), any mounted device will now appear automatically on the desktop. If you don't want this, you can pick a different mount point, say /mnt instead of /media, and now it does not show up on the desktop.

Lots to know and do here, and I can understand your frustration, because believe me, I've been there many times. But it can be made to work. Just keep at it. It is easy enough to get something wrong, and one thing I certainly can recommend is to keep looking for additional references online because sooner or later, you will find where someone has finally put it in terms that you can deal with. If you have the means to do so, try repeating the whole install and set-up sequence, perhaps on a different PC or drive, until it all seems to fit the way you want it to.

Lots to know and do here, and I can understand your frustration, because believe me, I've been there many times. But it can be made to work. Just keep at it. It is easy enough to get something wrong, and one thing I certainly can recommend is to keep looking for additional references online because sooner or later, you will find where someone has finally put it in terms that you can deal with. If you have the means to do so, try repeating the whole install and set-up sequence, perhaps on a different PC or drive, until it all seems to fit the way you want it to.

Thanks Oldeffox...yes I'm finding that out. But I think I'll eventually get there. Learning to use Ubuntu has been a lot of fun and frustration. What I don't know is certainly more than I do.

dick

Setting Ubuntu up to work with the various drives in your PC or with any external ones cn seem a bit daunting. First, in editing the /etc/fstab file, you might make a mistake or two and this would have serious repercussions, but you can always boot back to the LiveCD and work from here. I noted that the LiveCD has the gparted partition editor included, the the actual install does not. It is worth adding back, as it let's you see the partitions set up on your internal drives, how they are labled, what their UUID numbers are (look under Information when you click on any line for a partition), and the visual is really a big help.

I also found that the partition editor tends to show you what it found on each drive, which does not always correspond with what you have in /etc/fstab for that drive. If, say the file system type indicated is a mismatch, then you may have to use either the partition editor or an edit of the /etc/fstab to bring the two into agreement. You also have another command line tool to help, which is fdisk. Those that date back to the days of DOS probably know something about fdisk, or at least the DOS version by that name.

The Linux version of fdisk gives you some features that are not directly found in the partition editor, such as the ability to fix any problems with the partition sequence, or to delete and add back a partition, even to designate what type it is suppose to be (and includes an incrediably long list of fs types that can be used at this point). You can then verify your changes using the command v, then write the changes to the drive using w, or use q to just quit without making the changes. Fdisk does not actually reformat a partition, but that is not a problem, because you can do that using gparted, using the option "Format to ..." when poised over the line for that partition. Gparted also let's you change the label for any unmounted partitions, and happens to include the mount and unmount options. Note that for Swap partitions, these are instead referred to as swapon and swapoff. To get into fdisk, you have to include a reference to the drive as well, such as fdisk /dev/sda means work with drive 0.

That's not the end of it either. For example, there is also grub. Just type the word "grub", and you have access to other commands that effect the boot process. These are worth exploring because they can be very useful.

I created a problem for myself in my setup of a new PC after the old one crashed. I wanted to port two drives into the new one, but they were both IDE, and the new PC will accept two IDE devices, but the BIOS insisted on making them Drive 1 and Drive 2. I wanted to use the new SATA drive already in the PC as my first drive. Yet i also whated to install a second DVD/CD drive which was an IDE, and that meant three IDEs where only two where allowed. I got an IDE SATA Adapter through eBay, and made one IDE drive connect through the adapter, but for the other IDE drive, I used an IDE to USB adapter instead and hooked it to a PCI 4+1 USB card that I installed in an empty slot.

So I managed to get all the drives installed and working together, but I had not made enough allowances for the partition order and designations by the various OSes that I had still on the drives and wanted to use. I mean everything seemed to be booting up right, but in /boot/grub/menu.lst, I had a grub statement that told root to use (hd0,6). That was fine with this was drive 0, but now it was drive 1. Grub was still able to boot up as requested, because it relied on the partition UUID to distinguish which partition to boot from, and the fact that this was now on drive 1 was not an issue. But with root set to hd(0,6), designated a swap partition, what happened is that it redesignated the partition from a linux-swap to just linux (83 hex code type changed to 82). This meant that the normally quiet boot process now reported failures, even suggesting that the superblock was messed up. Manual efforts to correct this got me nowhere, until I took bits and pieces reported by each tool, finally realized or recognized the inconsistency in what was there, and finally contrived between fdisk and gparted to get it right. The big thing though is that I kept getting told that the kernel could not reread the partition table on drive /dev/sda7, which was designated by me to be a swap partition, but now understood by grub to be the root (/) designated mounting point and ext3 file structure. I guess a swap partition doesn't need a superblock but ext3 does, and thus the reported error.

Just another example of what we sometimes find ourselves going through, just on the off chance that this might actually help someone else with a similar problem.