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Friday, April 25, 2008

Virtualbox How to: Gotchas involved in making a USB external hard disk device work on windows host

Preface


Sometime back, I installed Openfiler on a external hard disk (manufacturer: Iomega)that I had at home (running Windows Vista Home Premium). This was meant to be a proof of concept and pretty soon, I had to bring it to office desktop (running Windows XP SP2) to make it work with some other virtualbox virtual machines that I had built in my spare time.

Troubles in recognizing the USB external hard disk on windows XP


However, the problem that I faced on Windows XP SP2 host operating system was that the openfiler Virtual machine (using virtualbox 1.5.6 of course) would not recognize the USB external hard disk at all! The same USB device was working fine on windows vista.

After struggling with this problem for a while, I found a quick workaround (Not sure if it is documented in the user manual or not) and also tested some reset steps on windows, which seem to work with the Iomega external USB hard disk.

These steps should also be relevant to other hard disk models in general.

Some more details...


In my case, windows had detected the USB drive and had even installed the Virtualbox driver for it. USB support was enabled for the openfiler virtual machine in the settings. The external hard disk was selected, but still no iscsi drive showed up on doing a fdisk -l
When to know a device is being accessed..

Well, if the device makes a whirring noise and the light blinks or comes on, it is enough to know that the device is being accessed internally and something good happened in terms of making the USB device work.

The setup that worked..


However, this setup worked after a little tinkering:

Firstly, make sure the USB controller and EHCI controller is enabled. Then choose the USB external hard disk device from the list of all USB devices and enabled it.

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Make sure no other Virtual machine is accessing the same USB device. From what I have seen, if the same device is accessed by other virtualbox VMs, an exclusive lock is acquired on it, which makes it difficult to be used by other virtual machines.
This is true with windows too. Windows will stop seeing the USB hard disk when it is being used by a virtualbox virtual machine. At least, I have seen this behaviour with virtualbox 1.5.6

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Make sure that Windows is able to detect the USB device first. If not, then you need to troubleshoot that first. Usually, powering off the device, unplugging it from the USB port and restarting the windows PC/desktop/laptop works great. (Hey, its windows).

You want to see something like this in your system tray to be sure of this.



Now you know for a fact that windows, your guest Operating system, detected the USB drive fine. So now, there is a good chance that virtualbox will detect it too.

Fire it up..


Power up the virtual machine and check if the USB device got detected. A simple fdisk -l will show it as a iscsi device, with names like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb or so. If you do not see anything of the sort, you can be certain that the device did not get detected. Another visual way to know is to see if the light on USB device comes up or not. No light, no access.

The manual workaround if the device is still now seen after powering up the virtual machine ..


However, there is still another trick up our sleeve that can be tried.

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At the bottom message bar of the virtual machine, right click on the USB plug icon. You will see that a list of the detected USB devices comes up. Select the external hard disk. Unless another virtual machine is running that is using the same USB device, there is a very good chance that the light on the hard disk will light up like this:



At this point, you may also see a windows dialog box saying that a virtualbox USB device was detected and the driver needs to be loaded:


Double check before you congratulate yourself..


All right! So it looks like your device got accessed after all.

There are many ways to confirm if it really got detected by the virtual machine as a scsi device or not:

1) Check the fdisk -l command's output:

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2) Check the contents of /proc/scsi/scsi file:

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3) Check the content of /var/log/messages or the output of dmesg command:

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A quick Recap...


Once again, if this does not work, just go back to the basics:

1) Power off the USB device (when applicable) and take it out

2) Reboot windows

3) Plug in the USB device

4) Make sure windows detects it

5) Make sure the virtual machine has the USB device enabled in its setup

6) Start up the virtual machine. Make sure no other virtual machine is using the same USB drive.

7) If you do not see the USB device, force it to be attached by right click on USB plug icon in bottom bar of virtualbox VM application window

Hope that helps.

5 comments:

  1. [...] some messing about you can get the drive to register on the guest and then mount both the drive and the shared folder. [...]

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  2. hehe... it works finally... thanks...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post... nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This worked, thanks! Istill having another problem though. Even after I shut down the guest and unplug + replug the device, windows no longer detects it. I tried removing it from the list of usb filters in vbox but that makes no difference. Any suggestions?

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