USB in VM - howto?

[FritzS]

I had migrate my Windows 10 from VMware Fusion to VirtualBox - all problems solved during migration!
But one open:
When connecting a USB device to VMware Fusion, I was asked whether it should be mapped to the Mac or to Windows in the VM. I miss this feature with the VirtualBox 6.0.4 r128413 (Qt5.6.3).
How I could enable this feature?

[socratis]

There's no "ask you at the device insertion" feature in VirtualBox (Thankfully! I like it like that).

What you can do is either use "Shared Folders" (easiest to setup, just for simple copy-file operations), or "USB passthrough" (maybe a little bit more difficult, gets full access to the disk).

What do you want to do with the USB storage device? Just access some data stored in the USB? Please elaborate, details matter. And they matter a lot...

[FritzS]

I use Windows for an older Nokia 6300 and an older Falk Navi. This both devices use USB for Contact with their Windows Software to the device.

These devices are already out of order, I only save the Windows 10 installation for all cases where you can't get along with macOS or Crossover (wine - Windows Emulation).
Otherwise I test Linux Mint, FreeBSD or TrueOS, etc. in the VM.

I rarely want to format external USB hard drives with ext4 or NTFS. I need this for DLNA servers like the Fritz! Box.

Some years ago I had originally Windows and Linux running in VirtualBox, only a Linux update crashed my Mac OS X with Kernel Panic. That's why I switched to VMware Fusion.
I use the VMs very little, but I have to pay for VMware Fusion upgrades every year, so I test a return to VirtualBox.
Unfortunately I had to read in this forum that there were already kernel panics under Mojave.
I run my old Mac Book 5.1 late 2008 necessarily still with ElCapitan 10.11.6. A new acquisition of a Mac is still pending this year.

[socratis]

I use Windows for an older Nokia 6300 and an older Falk Navi. This both devices use USB for Contact with their Windows Software to the device.

Great! I used to use my Win VM for a similar reason; to connect my "Nokia C2-05". Now I got myself an iPhone, much easier to deal on an OSX host...

So, you need to read the following thread: USB basics and troubleshooting, all of the posts.

I was using 3 different USB filters, depending on the mode that I wanted to connect the Nokia phone. It was really a shame that they devoted three ProductIDs to just a single model... Here are the USB filters that I used. I include only the values that are actually used in the filter, for brevity. The rest of the values are empty:

Name:      Phone: Nokia C2-05 Data Trasfer
VendorId:  0421
ProductId: 0576

Name:      Phone: Nokia C2-05 Nokia Suite
VendorId:  0421
ProductId: 0577

Name:      Phone: Nokia C2-05 Media access
VendorId:  0421
ProductId: 0578

To tell you the truth, I don't think I've ever tried the "On-the-fly" technique, I really prefer the filters, but I may be somewhat biased.

Unfortunately I had to read in this forum that there were already kernel panics under Mojave.

Not that easy to reproduce I'm afraid. And there are a lot of people running VirtualBox under 10.14. You could try it easily and see if it panics for you or not (I doubt it). It most certainly doesn't crash when I boot my MBP from an external HD with a fresh 10.14.3 installation and nothing else except VirtualBox.

I run my old Mac Book 5.1 late 2008 necessarily still with ElCapitan 10.11.6.

Same here; my MacBookPro8,3 is still on 10.9.5 (not really supported when running 6.0.4) and my MacBookPro11,5 is on 10.11.6 (again, not really supported when running VirtualBox 6.0.4). But as I said, I have an external HD that boots several OSX versions, so I can see if a specific behavior is reproducible across OSX versions...