virtualbox.org

Hi,

I have a WIndows 7 Home Premium SP1 laptop, and had created a typical vm with vmdk underlying storage. Inside the vm I loaded and run Backtrack 5, which I believe is a specialized Ubuntu Linux variant.
I have the network on that machine bridged so that it detects my HP Pavillion laptop's wireless nic. That all works fine: a wireless nic gets plumbed within the guest, and I have routes (e.g. netstat -rn) and internet connectivity.
I then installed the same Backtrack 5 on a Sandisk Extreme usb 3.0 32GB thumbdrive. Booting the laptop from the usb stick at bios, I can get the wireless nic to plumb and bind.
And I then have internet connectivity. Makes sense, because it has exclusive reservation on the wireless nic.

I then followed a procedure to create another vm at Windows running, using the already Backtrack OS -installed usb drive. It's a workaround essentially, because Virtual Box doesn't directly support booting and running off a usb device.
That worked, and the machine boots up and runs fine.

Now, the issue is, that inside this 2nd vm, (running on usb drive), the wireless nic is not detected. I have adjusted the vm settings to be bridged and so forth, just like the other file-based vm that works.
I cannot get the wireless nic to plumb up.

Any ideas?

Thanks- Brian

First of all, explain to me how you can make a wireless device appear in the guest if your bridge on the host wifi nic, since Virtualbox only emulates cabled adaptor?
Or are you passing a USB wifi adaptor to the VM directly? In which case that's not bridging and will require the drivers in the guest, which I guess you don't have.

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
I am most likely misinformed; thanks for clearing that point
I am relatively new with virtual box but seasoned with UNIX
Linux.
So however the guests emulate the host's actual physical wireless nic, the problem still stands
Where,upon boot/startup, the file-based guest grabs an address from the host via dhcp, sets up
Routes and has internet connectivity. The setting for this machine is bridged.
But, the usb-based guest running the same OS, will not get a dhcp address nor routes.
It has no internet connectivity, nor local network.
It also has the same bridge setting.
Not sure what's going on?

Please provide the VM log file aswell as the guest settings, both described here, and make sure you attach the files as zip.