I am having difficulty connecting an USB external hard drive to my guest VM. My host machine is a MAC desktop and the OS is Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

When a virtual machine is powered on, VMware Workstation automatically assigns each of its virtual network adapters an Ethernet MAC address. MAC stands for media access control. A MAC address is the unique address assigned to each Ethernet network device. Virtual machine applications allow your personal computer to act and run as if it is a Mac. To begin this process, a copy of a virtual machine client is required. For this, you will use Oracle VirtualBox, which is a free virtual client software package.

I am running VirtualBox 4.1.4 to create a Virtual Machine running Windows 7. This all seems to be running well with no problems and my USB drive is visible and accessible in the host OS but not in the guest Windows. I have followed the instructions in the online User Manual, and have tried at least half a dozen times to attach the USB drive to the Windows 7 machine but without success. At no time do I get any error messages of any sort. Could someone please help with this problem? Posts: 1 Joined: 13.

Is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. Get bootcamp for mac rutgers software. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item.

Oct 2011, 19:09 Primary OS: Mac OS X other VBox Version: OSE other Guest OSses: Windows 7. This is one of the most common problems reported in the forum and you can't read more than a few topics before tripping over versions of it in it's various manifestations.

The main problem is that for USB storage devices you can't have two computers (your guest VM and the host) accessing the device at the same time. What usually happens is that the host will snatch the device and mount it on the desktop before the guest has a chance to see it. The solution to this is to create a filter as described starting on page 52 of the User Manual under USB support (ha, I bet you didn't see that coming).

The filter will then allow the guest to grab the device from the host. It's usually best to create the filter (your guest needs to be shutdown first), then unplug the USB device and start the guest and wait for it to complete startup, and then plug the USB device into the computer. If the stars are aligned and the gods are smiling on you, you may actually see the device in the guest. Volunteer Posts: 911 Joined: 3. Mar 2009, 00:29 Location: Between Heaven and Hell Primary OS: Mac OS X other VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows XP SP3, Windows 7. The way that I have found to solve this problem that seems to work almost every time is: * Insert the USB drive, * wait for OSX to mount the drive, * eject the drive in Finder, and * then select the Devices USB Devices menu and select the USB drive to mount the drive.

This works because you have to unmount the USB drive from OSX before you can mount it on your guest OS, but the drive must still be plugged in. I have tried playing with filters with limited success. They work sometimes, but this method seems to work almost every time. Hope this helps. Posts: 2 Joined: 13.

Oct 2011, 18:38 Primary OS: Mac OS X Leopard VBox Version: OSE other Guest OSses: WinXP CentOS. I am having the same problem and what's worse is up until recently this worked fine. I'm well aware a USB drive is useable by only a single computer. My host OS is Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and my guest is Windows XP. I have the latest versions of VirtualBox and Guest Additions installed. The USB drive does not show up in my host OS. While in my guest OS I can see that the device is checked for use under the guest.

But I still don't have access to it. I'm guessing a VB update somewhere along the line broke this functionality. It used to work flawlessly for me.

Posts: 3 Joined: 21. Feb 2010, 09:05 Location: Austin Primary OS: Mac OS X other VBox Version: OSE other Guest OSses: Ubuntu 9.10, OpenSolaris, WinXP, Win 7 • • •. Had the same problem with VirtualBox 4.1.8 running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on OSX 10.6.8. To solve the problem I had to install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.8-75467.vbox-extpack this is different than the Guest extensions (which I had installed as part of the original installation). With the extension pack install I then was able to enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller in the machine setting -> ports -> usb. I also added the device to the filter list. How to add heading in microsoft office word 2011 for mac.

If the USB device gets mounted in OSx then I need to be ejected before it can be access by the virtual machine. Now I can access the drive without issues.