[SOLVED]Installed Win10 VM can't see USB drive, don't understand shared folder route

[mlacharles]

I download and installed the latest version of VirtualBox. I'm running MInt 21 Cinnamon. I set up a Windows 10 virtual machine.It seems to work fine but couldn't get it to see a USB drive. I tried a suggestion from a previous install:

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sudo adduser $USER vboxusers
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers lnk

I logged out and back in.
I plugged in a thumb drive and with Vbox running but Windows not
I tried to add the USB device in VBox but that didn't work.This did work with an older version of VBox. Then I noticed that cosmo in another post about USB drives said they thought using a USB drive directly (as I understood the comment)was not a good idea. So I tried a method from another post: viewtopic.php?p=2133559#p2133559

But can't get that to work either. I've confused myself and not sure what I'm doing wrong. I do have a folder path in MInt /media/lnk. Why do I put lnk in the "Folder Name" field and MyMedia as a mount point? Where is the MyMedia folder supposed to be? When I plug in a thumb drive Mint shows it on my Desktop with a it's name like "Kingston" or "6F62-3213: which also shows up as /media/lnk/Kingston or /media/lnk/6F62-3213. And I never see it in the Windows VM.

[Cosmo.]

Let us try to unravel this, but let us do this in small steps, otherwise we might even make the confusion greater.

At first a general hint: Nearly everywhere in the VB Manager you can place the pointer to an field and if you wait a few seconds, you will get a pop-up hint. Those hints do possibly answer the one or other question.

Secondly: (Only for Linux guests): The guest account must be member of the group vboxsf.

Now to the shared folder: You can place the shared folder on your host wherever you want; the only precondition is, that you have write permission. So a folder inside of your home is the best choice. (User Altair placed it outside home, you can do this later, but for now we should eliminate any unnecessary complication.) The shared folder must obviously have a path and a name, but the field Mount point is not necessarily needed and I leave it at this point out. It is needed for automatically mounted folders. For now you need to tell VB, if the guest shall have write permissions, if it shall get automatically mounted (at now leave this unchecked) and if it shall get created permanently (check this).

Reboot the guest and check, if you can reach the shared folder from your guest.
It does not make sense to proceed, as long we do not have this working.

[mlacharles]

OK, I solved one problem. I had not installed the Guest Additions. I mis-understood when I read that they no longer had to be downloaded because they came with the VB install package, that they were automatically installed when I set up my Windows 10 guest. That was cleared up by another post I made. But I made another mistake. I ran the install from the install folder so I'm pretty sure I've installed the additions in my Mint kernel. Should I remove them? Does it matter? Now I have an icon on my Desktop "VBox_GAs_6.1.38. I found a guide to install them in a Windows guest. So that's done.

Then I followed Cosmo's directions and added a share folder (called Transfer) to my home folder, and checked the permissions. This raises another question. The owner is listed as lnk-lca and the group lnk. When I check "whoami" I get lnk. lca came from when I first installed Mint (my name?, user name?) I don't remember.
So what does lnk-lca mean for setting permissions for example? Clearly I don't have much of an understanding about permissions.

I set up the shared folder in VBox then started Windows. The folder is there in Network, \\\VBOXSVR\Transfer and I can see something I copied to it.

[Cosmo.]

I ran the install from the install folder so I'm pretty sure I've installed the additions in my Mint kernel.

I have no idea, what you mean. What did you install? VirtualBox? The guest machine? The guest additions?
What is the install folder?
What makes you believe, that guest additions get into the kernel? Especially asked, because the guest additions get installed inside of a virtual machine (in your case Windows, which of course does not have a Linux kernel).

The owner is listed as lnk-lca and the group lnk. When I check "whoami" I get lnk. lca came from when I first installed Mint (my name?, user name?) I don't remember.
So what does lnk-lca mean for setting permissions for example? Clearly I don't have much of an understanding about permissions.

Open a terminal and enter the command

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ls -l

Provide the content here and please (if possible) enclosed with code-tags (that is this, what I used for the command, you can reach it with the </> button in the forum's editor window.

[mlacharles]

I'll try to be clearer.

I found the guest addition ISO was installed in /usr/share/virtualbox when I installed VBox. In that directory I double clicked on VBoxGuestAdditions.iso there and an installer ran. At one point there was a message about adding something to my linux kernel. At the end, as I mentioned there was an icon on my Desktop titled "VBox_GAs_6.1.38." so I thought it was a safe bet I had screwed up and had installed something in Mint. After that I added the guest additions to my Windows client using this procedure:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36500_01/E3 ... tions.html

My terminal output from ls -l is below:

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lnk@lnk-MS-7A64:~$ ls -l 
total 1719
drwxrwxr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 25 14:45  aa_bottles
drwxrwxr-x  5 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 25 09:23  BU
drwxrwxr-x 19 lnk lnk    4096 Sep  2 10:04  Claws_Mail
-rwxrwxrwx  1 lnk lnk   19456 Jan 14  2016  copy.dot
drwxrwxr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 25 09:36  Crossover
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Sep  6 07:02  Desktop
drwxr-xr-x  3 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 31 12:05  Documents
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Sep  6 20:04  Downloads
-rw-rw-r--  1 lnk lnk     106 Jul 10  2020  Library_bar
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk   12288 Aug 29 10:30  Music
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 31 11:47  Pictures
drwxr-xr-x  3 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 28 13:19  Public
drwxrwxr-x  3 lnk lnk   12288 Aug 19 10:39  removed_wallpapers
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 28 19:15  Templates
drwxrwxr-x  3 lnk lnk    4096 Sep  7 09:14  Transfer
drwxr-xr-x  2 lnk lnk    4096 Aug 29 10:31  Videos
drwxrwxr-x  3 lnk lnk    4096 Sep  5 16:00 'VirtualBox VMs'
drwxrwxr-x  2 lnk lnk   16384 Aug 19 10:39  Wallpapers
lnk@lnk-MS-7A64:~$

The one place I see lca rather than lnk is at the login screen when I log onto my /Home partition. Just above and on the left of the box where I enter my password lca appears.

[FUBAR]

Hey there, having the same issue although it seems I got the extras and accessories addon's loaded, rebooted. Facing same issue. I plug USB into computer and VB Win 10 does not see one. Is it necessary to have a specific brand or size?

[Reddog1]

I open usb's in a somewhat unconventional manner. Plug your usb into your mint host. It will mount in /home/media/yourusername/xxxxxx(the drive designation)
With the Windows VM running, open VBoxManager>Settings and navigate to 'Shared Folders'
When the sharing windows opens, click the Plus folder on the right and navigate to the mountpoint on your linux host via the Folder Path and the dropdown menu to 'other'. At the mountpoint, choose it and then click 'automount'. Then it should show up in your Windows file manager as a disk that you can read and write to.
Hope this helps.

Note: this assumes you have added your username to the vbox users group:

$sudo gpasswd -a yourusernamehere vboxsf

[Cosmo.]

There is no lnk-lca to be seen in your output. Obviously your username is lnk and the owner of the folder Transfer is lnk. So all as expected. The shared folder should work in your guest.

@FUBAR:
Please create your own thread. Mixing the problems of 2 users will make this thread unusable for both of you.

[mlacharles]

Everything seems to be working fine now. Thanks for your help and explanations.