[SOLVED] USB ports not working

[MikeW]

I have a Win2K guest over a Ubuntu 9.04 host. My primary goal is to connect my USB printer do do some formatting that is unsupported by Linux CUPS for my printer, but is supported by the mfrs Win2k Drivers.

I installed the PUEL version of VirtualBox especially for this situation.

I have also added an external USB drive to help isolate the problem.

Both devices are recognised and work normally under the host (Ubuntu) OS, and previously worked with the Win2K OS as a native OS.

My problem is that the USB devices are recognised and appear as "devices" on the guest OS, but no data gets passed!

Neither device is "seen" by the WIn2K OS!

Can anyone suggest a way to troubleshoot (or FIX!) this?

[Perryg]

Are the guest additions installed?

[MikeW]

Yes the latest guest additions are installed.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

After some more experimenting though I found out that the Windows USB device drivers did not get installed when I installed the OS for some reason.

I tried a Win XP guest and it at least gave me a warning message!

Installing the driver made it all work on both XP and Win2K, after the customary half hour wait and two reboots.

Sigh - after two months of using Ubuntu for almost everything I had forgotten how hard it can be to get all the pieces of Windows to play together nicely.

So far only four applications need to be run from a guest system and one of those is IE8 - (For some reason IE8 is required by a bank which I deal with sometimes).

Mike

[mwtomlinson]

How, exactly, did you add the port? Inquiring minds want to know...