cannot access usb in VBox

Hello George, i had a go round with that too but its pretty simple in Mepis . When you fire up VB in the settings tabs there is a listing for usb , you no doubt have the upper box checked but on the mid right there are some buttons just click on the top one to make as many nodes as you need. No special urls or descriptions are needed they are adaptable to anything you plug in. Reading the manual got me into a lot of permission hassels that are not needed fstab is already setup for all users. Just make some nodes and plug in & winders will usually take the ball & run with it.

jim

Make sure the usb device is plugged in before starting the VB, and then in the very top of the VB screen there is a drop down menu: devices

From there you can find a section called USB devices. Simply select the one you want and you are good to go. No need to get inside configuration screens and such.

Thanks Jim and eadwine
I should have said that I have already gone through this configuration. There are 10 usb devices listed in the DEVICES list, all of them selected and connected physically

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

You made the nodes and winders don't see your devices? Not sure i get your meaning.

jim

Did you click on the device you need that is listed in the devices list? If you don't click on it it won't be active even though it is showing.

Thanks Guys
the items in the devices list are all selected (X) and if I click on any of them that one becomes de-selected.
In case it is relevant my pc make up is

e-Machines 820 P4 2.60GHz
Trigem motherboard
Phoenix ver6.00 bios
1 Gb ram
GeForce 5200 video
hda 18Gb Win xp
hdb 114Gb Mepis 6.5rc3 with data partitions
sda usb external drive 300Gb Storage and 'playing area'
hdc Aopen DUW1608/ARR cd/dvd r/w
hdd dvdrw ide 16x
3Com wireless interface
Realtek Ethernet interface
RaLink Network controller

At the moment I am only trying to get the use of the 300Gb external hard drive although I have tried also to access pen drives

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

I think we are talking a different thing here to click. When you have the VM running, so NOT in the main settings where you can also set the amount of ram and such, but when you have started the VM on top there are three drop down menus: VM - devices - help.

Click devices - usb devices - and then the device you wish to use.

Hi eadwine

It is that group of usb devices that I was referring to. There are five devices listed (marked with "X" ) and if I click on any of these, the "X" disappears and I still do not get access to that device. When I hover the pointer over each of these devices, the small information window says that the devices are "captured". When I added vacant device spots, One of the five devices appeared in MyComputer (a scanner), but it does not work.

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

The X threw me off.. I don't have that X showing at all.

Just posting an image temporarily to show you what things look like to me:

No X at all, this is running VB 1.3.8 and windows 2000 Pro inside mepis 6.0.

Thanks eadwine

(This post has forced me to learn how to take and post screen shots)

Host Mepis 6.5rc3 Guest XP Pro

The first shows 5 usb devices not selected in VB and the result in My Computer

The second shows 1 device (usb hdd) selected and its effect

The third shows all devices selected and their effect

The image scanner (Lexmark 1200 series), appears in My Computer but does not work (Mepis apparently does not have a driver for it)

The removable disks are part of the eM Bay Reader and work

The external hard drive is not available BUT IT CAN BE SAFELY REMOVED FROM XP

I am baffled!!!!

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

You do have to resize the screenshots a bit though, they are kinda big

In any case.. interesting find.. I never even looked in my computer LOL

I looked again and see when the device is selected a V shows next to it where you have that X. I looked in my computer, but it didn't show there. I went to the device manager and yep, it shows up and the device is working properly (as I know and so it says).

Stupid aside question: have you installed the software for the device already?

George i have been playing with VB quite a bit last few days & have picked up some practical experience that might help. First i have been having my own problems with printers on parallel port trying to install software the way one would in normal win install, it offers lpt1 but no way can i make it work. But by removing all software & print errors then rebooting winders with device unplugged some times multiple times rebooting till nothing shows in installed software or devices and then booting winders and plugging printer into usb port while its up & running then a new hardware shows up. Doing a normal full software install is not working. But if i just point xp to the install files it will setup printer its own way & it works with usb. I have no clue why or how the host supports the VM but winders seems to be doing its thing independently in some respects to the host and it will take a little time to sort out all the ins and outs of this app.

I think the key is making xp see & setup the hardware by unplugging devices and plugging in devices one at a time then trying to make it happy with only what it wants in the way of drivers etcetra only after its up and running with no errors. For me with any kind of error laying around it wont do anything. (definitely acts like wdoze)

On the positive side for me anyway, i have been able to work around and make things work. Plug and play hardware seems to help with some devices too. I was surprised when i plugged in an old Umax Astra 2000U scanner it installed immediately, works in 6.5 rc3 too by the way.

So i suggest you remove all the non working stuff and have another go at it the way i have described & see what develops. Good luck!

jim

Just a fair warning I do have to add is to not just remove or add things while a computer is running. USB is safe, but parallel connections are iffy.

Thanks eadwine and jim

With the help of eadwine I have managed to get the scanner working but, like jim, I have had no success with any of my 3 printers (Alps, Oki, Lexmark). It is late here now, (UK) so I will follow up jim's suggestions tomorrow.

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

Back again folks

I have now spent more time examining the problem. Following previous advice from eadwine and jim, I disconnected completely all external hardware and reconnected only my usb hard drive while the guest windows os was running.
The usb hard drive ENCLOSURE immediately appeared in the VM > usb list. I selected it for installation but it did not appear in My Computer. The hard drive did then appear in system > device manager as maxtor 6 l300r0. Selecting this and examining its properties revealed all the volumes contained in the disk, but I was unable to access any of these volumes to determine their properties.So it would appear that the hard drive and its partitions are visible in Device Manager but have no link to My Computer.

Does anyone have any idea what is happening

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.

George if you have room on your hard drive i would try 6.5 final. Warren has worked up some Qt4 Mepis packages and along with them come a lot of helper packages that seem to make the layer between OS more stable. My rc3 install worked but winders just didn't seem right or VB either. Every thing seems to work differently now so i think i will have to relearn the way it should work so don't have too many pointers at this point.

jim

Thanks jim,

I have plenty of room so I will try that tomorrow

Regards George

The Devil is in the detail.