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If the host miss a device driver, can the guest get raw access to the device and use the device?

Solaris does not have NTFS drivers by default. The existing NTFS drivers are bad and not usable (2MB/sec). I inserted an USB NTFS disk into my Solaris pc, and it failed to mount because Solaris have no NTFS driver, but the disk got recognized. I gave the WinXP virtual machine access to the USB drive. It did not work.

What will happen in this case (Solaris has no NTFS driver installed)? Are there any chances WinXP can access the NTFS usb disk in a raw way so it can read and write the NTFS disk? Or is it doomed to fail, the underlying host needs to understand NTFS? Or does it suffice if the guest understands NTFS?

In this case, the Host should not matter for file system support on the Guest. As long as the guest has it's support, it should work. Maybe it's the USB implementation on Solaris that's the problem, though it's rewritten a few versions ago to fix some issues. What do you get when you create a filter for the USB device in the VM settings and plug it in after the VM is fully loaded? Does it's device manager and storage management show any differences?

It does work but very slowly.

I plugged in the "WD My Passport 070A USB hard drive" 1TeraByte and it starts to load a small setup program so I can install the drive in WinXP. The program pops up, but I have not installed the program. What does it do? Does it format the entire drive? The small setup program resides in a small static partition on the USB drive. I could not see the storage partition where I have all my data. I can also see an yellow question mark in the Device Manager in WinXP.

After 5 minutes or so, WinXP suddenly started to scan the large partition and I can finally see my data. I am now copying a file, but it is really slow. 700 MB takes like 15 minutes, which makes it in the order of 1MB/sec transfer speed.

So, no. I can not use VB for file transfer. To bad.

Anyway, thanx for your help.


PS. A last question. So, if I have for instance a USB web cam or USB printer with no Solaris device drivers, and if I use USB filter, do you recon the WinXP guest will able to use the device?

Yes, the printer/scanner/webcam should work. Though it's speed might be an issue too, especially for the webcam. In the past, webcams weren't of much use because of the throughput.

For the USB hard drive, does the Host see it's partitions? If it does, then you can try RAW disk access. Read the manual, chapter 12 (I think), Advanced Topics, for more information on how to use RAW disk access. I'm not entirely sure if it's available for Solaris though.