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This would seem to be very simple but I am unable to get the guest (Windows XP) to register the local usb drives, either flash memory or external. The extensions has been loaded and there is a check in the usb and usb2 boxes. The drives show up in the usb devices list but if I click on them nothing happens. If I click on them again then i get a message that the device is busy.

It seems that these devices should show up automatically when they are inserted. There is a sound of the system recognising them but they do not appear in My Computer and I do not get the usual autoplay dialog box.

Any ideas please

Try this in your guest.
Go to Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management.
Since you had the sound, your device should be listed there.
If it is, change the drive letter assigned to the device.

Thanks, I had the same problem and this was the solution!

Background: I had a Shared Folder assigned to D: - and it seems VB tried to assign the same drive letter to the USB device. When I changed the latter to F: in disk management, the USB drive appeared correctly.

One might classify this as a bug in VirtualBox, but I leave it to folks more inclined with the product to actually file a bug.

bb42 wrote:Background: I had a Shared Folder assigned to D: - and it seems VB tried to assign the same drive letter to the USB device

Nope. VB does not assign drive letters. Period. Windows OS hosts and guests do that, not VBox.

There is an additional problem of inexperienced users who don't understand that drive letters assigned to removable drives can change on a Windows system [*]. So, if you embed a path to a file on a removable drive, that path will be broken if the drive letter changes. It was Windows which did that, not VBox.

AFAIK, Windows doesn't even offer the obvious solution: assign a permanent UNC identity to a drive, and use that instead of drive letters. AFAIK you can only use UNC identifiers for network objects, not local drives.

[*] For example. Plug a USB drive into a fresh Windows host. It will be assigned the first available drive letter, typically E or F depending on how many fixed hdds and CD/DVD drives your PC has. For the sake of discussion assume it was drive 'F'. Now remove the USB drive and plug in some other USB storage device, your cellphone say. It too will be assigned drive letter F, as before. Now while the cellphone is still plugged in, plug your USB drive back in. It will have its drive letter reassigned as 'G'. Once that happens it will continue to use 'G' every time it's plugged in, unless and until another similar conflict occcurs. If you had embedded an "f:\folder\whatever" path in a VirtualBox settings xml then that path would be broken by the change to 'G'. That is not the fault of VirtualBox, which has no control over this.