Accessing USB from my VM in Hyper-V

Question

I've got a Windows Server 2012 box running and today I installed Ubuntu. But from Ubuntu I need access to the USB key I physically inserted in to the Win2k12 server, how can I do this?

My Google searches comes up empty or not doable?

Solution

Hyper-V is a little funky with how you need to prep drives to be passed through to the VM. I haven't attempted this on a linux guest, but for windows guests a drive must be Offline in order to attach it to the VM. Go to Computer Management | Disk Management, right click your USB drive and click Offline (you can use diskpart to accomplish this as well if you want to script this procedure down the line). After you've taken the USB drive offline, go to the settings for the VM and add the USB drive to the VM and see if it is accessible on the guest. Here is a page I found quickly by googling that details the same process: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/3009-how-to-mount-an-usb-drive-in-hyper-v-vm-s