Why are my USB devices still grayed out in VirtualBox?

Question

I have been trying to get VirtualBox to enable my USB devices to attach them to the guest OS. However, when trying to attach them while the guest is running all devices are greyed out. Also device filters are not working.

I am pretty sure that this is a rights problem because it works perfectly when starting VirtualBox as root.

Here is my current setup:

• Host OS: Ubuntu 14.04.1 (64bit)
• Guest OS: Windows 7 (64bit)
• VirtualBox 4.3.20 r96996
• Guest additions are installed
• Package was downloaded from virtualbox.org

And this is what I tried so far:

• Followed the advice given in https://askubuntu.com/a/25600/14220, most importantly
• • Made sure that I am part of the vboxusers group
• • Switched USB support settings in VirtualBox on an off
• Added my user account to the lp group
• Added usbuser group and set the udev permissions for it as suggested by http://discussions.tomtom.com/t5/GO-800-1000-series-Via-series/My-Tomtom-in-virtuellem-Computer-z-B-Virtualbox/td-p/420042#M9758 (sorry, German text but you should get the gist)
• Made sure I have the "Use VirtualBox virtualization solution" user right as described in https://askubuntu.com/a/147791/14220
• Restarted both the guest and the host when changing user account settings

Slowly, I am running out of ideas. Most other posts I read about this problem were solved by adding the user to the vboxusers group. However, this did not fix it for me.

I think it might be possible that whatever resource needs to be accessed to handle USB devices is for some reason not accessible for the vboxusers group. I do not know which resource this is so I am unable to check.

Could you point me in the right direction to investigate this further?

Solution 1

I had the same problem as you. The group virtualboxusers and so on were correct.

After some search, it turns out that the kernel module did not correspond to the right version of my kernel (3.13.0-65-generic) and to my version of virtualbox (4.3).

The command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-4.3

solved my problem.

Hope it will help you if the question is still problem still persists.

Solution 2

I'm not sure if this will work, but these are the files owned by vbosusers on my machine, where USB is working right under Virtual Box.

sudo find / -group vboxusers
/dev/vboxusb
/dev/vboxusb/002
/dev/vboxusb/002/003
/dev/vboxusb/001
/dev/vboxusb/001/004

In another machine it looks like this

sudo find / -group vboxusers
/dev/vboxusb

So it looks like only ownership of /dev/vboxusb matters.

Hope that it helps.

Comments

[Charles Green]

Did you install the virtual box extension pack (This is not the same as the guest additions)

[Javier Rivera]

You should try to run VirtualBox as root and check if usb are enabled to it.

[Chris]

@JavierRivera As stated in the question, it works when I run VB as root.

[lightonphiri]

@Chris It just so happens that I have the same exact problem, using the same configuration settings you had. Did you by any chance find a solution to this issue? Would appreciate it if you shared how you resolved this---if you did that is.

[Chris]

@lightonphiri Sorry, problem still persists.

[lightonphiri]

@Chris Thank you for this. You workaround---starting VirtualBox as root---did the trick :)

[Chris]

Thanks, the problem went away in the mean time. I also did some VirtualBox updates in that time so it is perfectly possible that this was the issue.

[b_laoshi]

I'm fairly certain that I had this issue because I had installed VBox from the repos and then after the fact, I went back and installed from the VBox provided package. With them both installed, I uninstalled (with a purge) the repo version. This apparently removed all kinds of settings (particularly the vboxusers group and permissions) which were still needed for the version from the VBox website. The command above put everything back in place!