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I tried to use VirtualBox on iMac to run a guest Ubuntu 11.04. Thus I can access a ext4 USB hard-disk.

I met some difficulty and here is some note about how I fixed them.

Does not recognize the USB device.

Workaround in short: Set the virtual machine to have 1 CPU.

Some details (Ref):

  1. Configure VirtualBox to have only one CPU
  2. Add a new usb filter so that Virtualbox grabs external hard disk before Apple OS X
  3. Boot the guest Ubuntu. Monitor the syslog file to find out the USB device name: tail -f /var/log/syslog
  4. Connect the USB disk to you iMac (In my case the device name was sdb2 from the log above)
  5. sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt

When I configured the guest to have 4 CPUs, I got such errors in the syslog when I connect the USB disk:

May 20 16:18:29 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1600.516186] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
May 20 16:18:44 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1615.680173] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
May 20 16:18:59 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1630.948179] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
May 20 16:19:00 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1631.200204] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
May 20 16:19:15 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1646.372240] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
May 20 16:19:30 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1661.636297] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
May 20 16:19:30 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1661.888269] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
May 20 16:19:35 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1666.940269] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/8, error -110
May 20 16:19:41 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1672.061160] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/8, error -110
May 20 16:19:41 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1672.320260] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
May 20 16:19:46 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1677.353219] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/8, error -110
May 20 16:19:51 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1682.472212] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/8, error -110
May 20 16:19:51 as43-VirtualBox kernel: [ 1682.576327] hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1

But after I reconfigure the virtual box to only have one CPU, the problem was just gone.

Use Shared Folders (ref)

  1. You can add shared folders and give each of them a name from the settings of the VirtualBox or from a folder icon at right bottom of the virtual machine window.
  2. in the guest Linux, use mount command to mount the folder: sudo mount -t vboxsf sharename /mnt
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