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I followed the instructions under topic 'General advice for connecting any USB device to a Windows guest' in the [Solved] Connecting a USB Mobile Broadband Dongle to a VM post on this web forum but still can't get either a USB stick or USB portable harddrive to work in a Win98 or WinXP guest (the Host is Win7). I enabled the "USB Controller" and "USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller" options in the VM settings and then tried adding three different USB filters (one at a time then rebooting and testing them) in the VM settings USB | filters panel (a blank one, Generic USB2-CRW [5888] and Generic USB Flash Disk [0100]) but the guests never connect to the device I plug into the USB port.

As an example:
The stick is found on the host and it says it installed the USB virtual drivers but even if I unplug and replug it in, nothing appears in the windows guest (no drive letter assigned and the icon on the bottom right still says "No USB devices attached"). How do I go about getting win98 and winXP guests to recognize an attached USB stick or HD?

Well, Win98 didn't have generic USB mass storage drivers, so you're probably wasting your time on that one. Though if you look in the Win98 Guests tutorials then there's a link there to a 3rd party driver.

As to the XP guest, the tutorial you referenced does work. If it doesn't work for you then you probably didn't pay attention to the caveats. For example, that VirtualBox currently doesn't support USB3 devices. On some hosts it doesn't support USB3 ports at all (on Windows it does support USB1/2 devices in USB3 ports).

You may find it easier to forget USB and simply access the drive as a host shared folder. That will only work for XP: nothing much will work for Win98 except bundling the files as an ISO.

Yeah I had posted this before I got the networks working for both my Win98 and WinXP guests. Just got both working now so I don't need USB sticks anymore