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external hard drive not recognised
Posted: 9. Feb 2012, 22:07
by margaretb
I have recently installed VirtualBox. I have just one problem - all my usb devices are working fine, except my Freecom External Hard Drive. This worked fine on my last computer running XP Home. It does not work with Windows 7, so I installed VirtualBox in order to cure this. But no success. Any suggestions how I can get this device to work so that I can retrieve information from it
Re: external hard drive not recognised
Posted: 10. Feb 2012, 12:54
by mpack
margaretb wrote:This worked fine on my last computer running XP Home. It does not work with Windows 7, so I installed VirtualBox in order to cure this. But no success. Any suggestions how I can get this device to work so that I can retrieve information from it
You are chasing red herrings. Other than a physical defect with the drive, there is no valid reason why a USB mass storage device should not work with your new Win7 host PC.
Is this a Freecom Toughdrive? Those are awful things, they draw more juice from the USB port than the USB standard allows. Some PCs can tolerate that, others can't. I suspect your new PC can't, and it is not the fault of the PC. Toughdrive will send you an AC power supply for the drive if you email them.
In any case this has nothing to do with VirtualBox. If the host can't talk to that USB device at the most basic level then of course the VM can't either.