Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I have been struggling with blogs and forums trying to find the working solution for my dilemma since I originally installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I needed USB support for my virtual machines in order to really smooth out my work flow. My guest OS is Windows Server 2003 and my host OS is Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to be able to clone the virtual machine’s hard disk using Clonezilla and my external Western Digital, USB 500 GB hard drive. I realize that it is possible to “clone” a virtual machine through VirtualBox but, as I work on multiple physical machines, I needed the disk image to be able to install a fully configured guest OS without having to worry about the ID conflict that is common with cloning virtual machine’s the wrong way. I have compiled a step-by-step process on how I was able to successfully set up USB support. If at any point, your not seeing the same results I saw, just reboot. It is recommended by everyone who wrote an article about this. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19.generic. Here we go…

1. With VirtualBox 2.1.0 already installed and Guest Additions installed and running on your guest, open a terminal window and type “sudo adduser $USER vboxusers". This will add your user-name to the VBOXUSERS group.

2. Type “sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh" to open a configuration file for VBox that will allow you to enable USB support.
3. With that file open for editing, find this section of code:

   #
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

   Uncomment (remove # symbols) from the last four lines to make it look like this:

   #
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs-obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb


4. It is reported by many articles that this is a proper configuration for Ubuntu to use to support guest USB features. From here, open VBox, select your guest OS and go into settings.
5. Click on USB on the left and check the “Enable USB Controller” check box on the right. Also check the “Enable USB 2.0…” check box.
   
6. Plug in your USB device. On the right, click on the “plus” symbol and select the USB device you want to enable. This allows access to the USB device from the guest OS. It is recommended to unmount your USB device in your host OS but I never did and it worked great.
   
7. I had a problem with VirtualBox seeing my USB device but not loading it. The device would actually be greyed out on the on the “Device” menu in the virtual machine’s window. Just reboot your host machine if this is the case and try again.
   

That should be it. Let me know if this doesn’t work for any of you.