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Karl Morrison
Asked: 2016-03-01 17:19:48 +0800 CST

USB Device not seen in VirtualBox

  • 772

The the following to add my user to the group:

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers karl

Got the error message:

usermod: group 'vboxusers' does not exist

My groups are as following:

karl adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare vboxsf

I'm using VirtualBox 5.0.14, Ubuntu 14.04, Guest Additions 5.0.14 and Extension Pack 5.0.14. I can see my USB device in my host OS.

14.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Both your virtualbox and extension versions match. That's a critical part of the process.

    To solve the group problem use the commands sudo addgroup vboxusers and sudo adduser USERNAME vboxusers where USERNAME is your user name. Do both these things on the host. logout and back in for this to take effect.

    Note that vboxsf which you have listed in your groups is actually a filesystem type used by the mount command.

    Download the correct extension pack from this page and when prompted open it with Virtualbox.

    The final step is to setup USB support on your VM, opening setings for the VM in virtualbox with the VM shutdown, selecting USB and enabling USB 2.0 and adding and activating filters as needed. See Below:

    VB-USB

    Note: In the recent past USB 3.0 (XHCI) controllers were not supported but this functionality was added in Virtual Box 5.0

    Further information is available in the official documentation.If that doesn't sort it for you, drop me a comment and I'll expand on this.

    Sources:

    https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/USB

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/SharedFolders

    • 21

  2. In my case the issue was in wrong chipset settings in guest OS (Windows). Once I chose ICH9 I could see a lot of usb devices connected to my pc.

    • 1

  3. I also could not see USB devices. I ran through the usual suspects:

    • Extension pack not installed/wrong version.
    • User not member of vboxusers group.
    • Kernel modules not installed.

    After I exhausted all of these, I simply purged the VirtualBox package, reinstalled it, and suddenly I could see all of my USB devices.

    I'm not sure how this fixed things for me, but it did.

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