Cannot start any VM after enabling HDD USB passthru

[acidrop]

Hello,

I'm using Virtualbox 5.0.20 on Linux Mint 17.1 with Kernel 4.4.0-18 i386.

I have 3 virtual machines , all of them are different flavors of linux.

All work fine, it's just only when I try to connect an external usb drive to the vm guest where I have issues.

Specifically the first time I start the VM and I passthru the usb disk, everything works as expected.

I can mount the usb drive on the linux guest normally.

Now, If I power off the VM and start it again (with and without the usb disk connected), it hangs on the initial startup screen "Starting virtual machine..." and stays there forever.

The same happens if I try to start any of the VMs.

I tried to kill any VirtualBox processes and restart all related services but no luck.

The only way to overcome the problem is to reboot the host.

Can you please suggest what can be wrong? I'm attaching a screen shot.



Thank you,

Yannis

[Perryg]

Post the guests log file ( as an attachment ). Right click on the guest in the Main Manager then click show log. Save and post as an attachment. Compress if it is too large to post.

[acidrop]

Thanks for replying, I'm attaching the log.

Regards,

[Perryg]

Code: Select all

00:00:01.811970 File system of '/root/VirtualBox VMs/Ubuntu_16LTS/Snapshots' (snapshots) is unknown
00:00:01.812003 File system of '/home/acid/VirtualBox VMs/ubuntu/Ubuntu_16LTS.vdi' is unknown

I am not sure how you managed this but having the snapshots on root probably will not work properly for a normal user.

[acidrop]

I'm running VBox with root privileges, do you think that this can cause this issue?

[acidrop]

If I run Virtualbox as a normal user I don't have the ability to passthru usb disk (it's grayed out).

[Perryg]

Yes I do. From the looks of it you installed as an elevated normal user and then you switched to root and that plays havoc with the VBOX_USER_HOME environment.
VBox was not intended to be used as root and no one should be running as root anyway. It's one thing I don't help with, just too many security issues.

[Perryg]

If I run Virtualbox as a normal user I don't have the ability to passthru usb disk (it's grayed out).

Add your user to the vboxuser group on the host and reboot.

[acidrop]

Thanks for that it worked. However I just did a test, I ran the VM this time as a normal user and attached the ext. hdd.

It works the first time I start the VM, but unfortunately the second time I start it, it hangs on startup.

I will try to do the same thing with other usb devices like usb sticks and will report back.

[acidrop]

I did same test with usb stick and another usb hdd and although there is some delay on vm startup time, this time the vm starts normally each time.

I guess it may be something related to the specific hdd (it's usb 3.0).

Thanks for your help.