To avoid any data loss due to pending writes to the drive, it is a good practice to explicitly unmount the drive prior to handing control to the guest. Making it available to the guest will automatically and instantly unmount it from the host.

Unmount the flash drive (if it is auto-mounted on your host).

Insert the flash drive into your host machine's USB port. More on the use of device filters in the next section.īelow is the step-by-step procedure to mount and access a flash drive. Be forewarned that the USB drive, once made visible to the guest OS, will no longer be available to the host. Select either USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller or USB 3.0 (xHCI) Controller according to your actual hardware.Note that you can add USB Device Filters to define the types of USB drives which will be automatically made visible to the guest OS. Open VirtualBox Manager, click Settings, and select USB.

Before you can change the USB controller protocol, the virtual machine must be powered off. Modern hardware uses USB Controller 2.0 (EHCI) and USB Controller 3.0 (xHCI). VirtualBox defaults to using USB Controller 1.1 (OHCI). As root on the host, run the following command to add each VirtualBox user (e.g., peter) to the group. VirtualBox access to the host's USB drives is only granted to users of the vboxusers group. Configuring USBįollow the steps below to configure the VirtualBox USB.Īdd the user to the vboxusers group. The VirtualBox extension pack must be installed on the VirtualBox host.

This post shows you how to access, from your guest OS, a flash drive mounted on the Debian host. Parts one and two demonstrate how to install VirtualBox on a Debian host, and to build a FreeBSD virtual machine. This is part three of a three-part series on VirtualBox.

Virtualbox boot from usb device