Soultion to problem of mounting external disk drives on Virtual Box on Mac OS.

Soultion to problem of mounting external disk drives on Virtual Box on Mac OS.

Hey All !

Are you a Mac OS user ( Lion Possibly).  Did you ever think of virtual-izing the Win XP / Wind 7 on your machine with VirtualBox. Well then you have seen that the External drives ( thumb or external HDD) do not turn up or are greyed out ? How annoying !!  I have lost a ton of time on that.

Edit : 
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9762




Looks Like i am not the only one.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=45376&p=205964#p205964

Well after a bit of reading forums and and experimenting here is what i realized / learnt.

Note: VirtualBox (VB) will re-create /dev/vb* entries every boot ! Why ???  

So any permission set on this via command line will be lost.

To get your device to work you will need to do the following


Create a file called runvb.sh in your home directory.

# BEGIN SCRIPT 
# I call this by the name runvb.sh

sudo kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass
#sudo kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass
#sudo kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass
# note the commented code above un-comment if you find the kext is not revived.

sudo open -a VirtualBox.app
## END SCRIPT
Note : Unmount and unplug your device first.
Once that happens. Plug in your device only after the VB fully loads.

Try running this with sudo sh ./runvb.sh in the terminal .

next time you want it unplug the device after unmount and restart VB via the script!

Best of luck