USB grayed out - unable to connect - Fera FC11

[BlownCPU]

Hi Everyone,

I have installed for the second time XP under VB 2.2.4 and I'm using Fedora FC11 64bit.

When I click onto Device in the main window frame and select USB I can see the USB device but it is greyed out and I'm unable to see any USB device under XP.
The USB device is a 1GB memory stick.

I think it is to do with permissions but i don't know how to go about it.

All the best,

Blown CPU

[Perryg]

Your profile states that you are using the OSE version of VirtualBox. The OSE version does not support USB. You would need the PUEL version for that.

[alukin]

On Fedora you must enable usbfs manually and add your login to usb group. See this article for instructions:
http://www.derekhildreth.com/blog/how-t ... -tutorial/

VB install script for Fedora could do it but does not. And there is nothing in documentation about this "feature". May be it is fedora's fault that usbfs is not mounted by default, but documentation must say about such things.

[BlownCPU]

Sorry, no idea what the difference is between PUEL and OSE... I don't know what it stands for, I have the rpm which I downloaded from the Sun web site, it's not the one which I download through Fedora.

I've given the permissions tutorial a go and nothing it is still greyed out

Blown CPU

[Perryg]

Did you uninstall the one that you downloaded from fedora before you installed the one from Sun? If not that can be your problem.
They install a little differently and can not coexist. You can try to uninstall them both and then install the one from sun.
Be sure to get the one that is PUEL as the open source does not support USB, Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server, USB over RDP, or Serial ATA controller .
You can read about the differences here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions

[BlownCPU]

Perryg,

I have only installed the Sun installation and have never installed the Fedora one.

Just to clear up something which I don't quite understand... are you saying that I should have only installed the Sun version or should I have installed the Fedora version, uninstallit and then put the Sun version on as the Fedora version might have installed some components or made changes to permissions which are desirable?

This is my fstab for giving permissions to usb which is a group which I created and has an id of 502:
The "Share" partition is a the share partition for VB so that I can access file from within the VM and Linux.... this does not work either and I think it is the same problem also.

Code: Select all

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Thu Jun 25 20:00:18 2009
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or vol_id(8) for more info
#
UUID=36624de0-4059-4542-8034-70279fce5812 /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
UUID=1bda4169-e3de-4a6a-8283-832b68edf98d /tmp                    ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=a65239c7-a640-48ed-a5fe-544eaec0cc2f /                       ext4    defaults        1 1
UUID=fbcd39ad-9a00-4ca4-b607-bfca1ab015ef /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
UUID=3d007470-6da2-4f7a-8501-2626c941db57 swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  defaults        0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb2		/home/bloggs/Share	        ntfs-3g rw,user		0 0
/dev/sdb3		/home/bloggs/VM		ext3	rw,user		0 0
none /sys/bus/usb/drivers usbfs devgid=502,devmode=664 0 0

Blown CPU

[Perryg]

No you spoke about the fedora install and I took it that you had installed the one from them.
If you have been getting them from the Sun download section you do not need to uninstall at this point.

Read this http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 944#p33944 and it explains the proper way to setup your fstab. No need to create another gid, plus it will need to be the vboxusers group to get it to work in the guest AFAIK.

[hank_se]

The file that brakes USB support for VBox in FC11 is /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, comment out lines 23-27, result should look like this:

#if [ ! -d /proc/bus/usb ]; then
# modprobe usbcore >/dev/null 2>&1 && mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
#else
# mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
#fi

Reboot to make changes work.
This works for FC11 64-bit and VirtualBox 3.0.0 r49315.

[BlownCPU]

I've edited the file and the PC does not boot now.

In runlevel 1 I tried to edit the file back using vi but vi tells me that the File System is read only. How do i gget the FS to be read/write?

Even using liveCD could not edit thhe file as it says READ ONLY

Urgent help needed.

Thanks B-CPU

[Perryg]

Once booted type su and then enter. It will ask you for a password give it yours. Enter again.
You should now be at a # You should be able to edit the file then.

[BlownCPU]

Thanks for the info, I used the LiveCD to edit the file and had to first give the file read write permissions which you would have thought it would have anyway, did that and rebooted, system came up and USB works Thakns very much for that tip.... it took some time to get the answer but all is OK now

The reason why the system didn't boot was because of a typo error I did in that file, so sorry for the fuss.

Thanks to everyone a happy Blown CPU