USB crashes

[jbrock]

I did a search (which led here) on USB causing crashes on Virtualbox. I see a lot of responses, but no answers. I installed windows XP pro as a guest on my vista 64bit laptop so as to get around the fact that linksys refuses to support 64bit and my bi-directional print server will not work.

I had it working, but today I plugged in a USB memory stick to the guest, and vista crashed . When I rebooted and restarted the guest, it was hosed. System files corrupt. I spent an hour trying to save it before giving up and restoring from a backup I made of the XP hard drive file I made after installing.

Tried to reinstall the printer software, which requires plugging in the printer USB cable and same thing happened again. Vista crashed, Guest XP destroyed.

I am running VB 3.0.8 and, judging from the age of the relevant posts I have found, I would have assumed that they had this worked out by now. Is it just a given that one must avoid all things USB, or is it just certain host/guest combinations for which this is true?

[Perryg]

My experience with USB on a Vista host has been less than desirable.
I finally just settled on sharing everything and mapping it.
I can not tell you if it will work properly in Windows 7 because well I have no plans of installing Windows 7 as host. Well at least for a while.

I can tell you that USB works flawlessly using Ubuntu as host.

[jbrock]

restored my virtual hard drive from a saved copy and did a little experimenting. Turns out the odds of a crash after attaching any USB device to the guest XP is 100%. Funny thing is, I did not have this problem when I first created this guest. That was a couple of versions of Vbox ago. I used it to install a printer and then installed linksys software for the bi-directional print server and everything was fine. a couple of weeks later, after upgrading to 3.0.8, I made the mistake of plugging in my flash drive and crashed my laptop. Guest OS was trashed. Unfortunately, the backup I burned onto a DVD was before I installed the printer. I suppose I could try downgrading a couple of versions to see if USB support works, or I can wait and see if they get it working again in a newer version.

[myildi]

Hi,
I have the same problem with a Mandriva 2009 Spring client. I have tried to install my Windows printer in Mandriva and VB has totally crashed. If I ever close it, it corrupts the client hard drive and I am good for reinstalling everything. This is a real pain. I should really learn not to use the last version of VB because doing this had put me in trouble several times in the past too... I am really surprised that even such basic functions are not throughly tested before the release of a new version...

Otherwise, Mandriva 2009 under VB 3.0.8 really rocks and it is very reactive. I am sorry that I will have to spend time again for reinstalling the system. I have done a snapshot before testing USB but it is useless when the hard disk is corrupted
Is there a way to recover a corrupted virtual hard disk?

EDIT : I have been able to save my installation after switching to the clean snapshot, just before the attachment of the USB printer. I will not touch the USB configuration anymore, until a fix has been provided. This is rather frustrating...