virtualbox.org

We are trying to use virtual box with a windows 7 guest with a mag-tek USB credit card reader. The software we need to run, unfortunately, requires ActiveX, so we are hoping that we can run it on virtualbox on our office Macs. Virtual box is pretty slick, super fast, and we have it setup and running on 10 machines now.

This card reader, however, may be the devil.

It will work for a bit, and then start throwing all kinds of errors, usually saying cards are unreadable.

We've tried all kinds of things to troubleshoot. So far on a test system we have
-Clean install of OSX Mavericks
-Clean install of Windows 7 enterprise 32b in latest version of Virtual box with latest guest extensions on that mac
-Kept Virtual Box settings pretty much standard, 1500 mb memory, 1 processor, no file sharing, no shared clipboard.
-Setup Device Filter for the Card Reader

What we ****think**** is happening is that the USB card reader is intermittently becoming unassociated with the PC. We've found that when it stops working, unplugging it and plugging it back in makes it work again. At least for awhile. After finding that out, we've found that in the USB menu on the lower right of Virtual Box, the card reader eventually greys out, and at that point no longer works.

Any ideas what is happening here and if we can fix this?

If "Guest Extensions" means "Guest Additions" then they have nothing to do with USB, so you don't need to worry about them. You must however install the correct Extension Pack on the host.

Did you create a filter (in settings|USB) for the device?

Other than that, I'm afraid this is in the nature of a VM. Controlling non-virtual hardware will always be iffy at best, especially when you have two operating systems fighting for control and neither OS really knows that the other exists.

Have you checked whether your software will run under Wine? If it's quite old then it might. If don't know if Wine supports ActiveX.

Extension pack was installed

USB filter was created.

Other than the filter, no way to tell the mac to ignore the USB card reader and give control the pc always?

That's the job of the filter. I'm afraid I'm not a Mac user, so I don't how how filtering works on that platform.