Virtual box doesn’t recognise my usb drive

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kona49

Virtual box doesn’t recognise my usb drive

Post by kona49 »

I think I successfully managed to transfer my copy of Mint Mate onto a USB drive using the terminal. Virtual Box cannot “see” the file on my stick however, it is greyed out. The stick is mounted and appears as a disc image on the desktop.
When I copied Mint onto the stick I sent it to disk1, there was another option of disk1s1 which was Fat32. Could this be the problem?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
kona49

Re: Virtual box doesn’t recognise my usb drive

Post by kona49 »

I have just tried booting from the USB at startup. The disc appears but it still loaded up OS X. I assume this means my stick isn’t bootable?
Thanks for any advice.

Sorry. I have just tried again holding down opt when starting up, it only shows up the hard drive as the unnamed drive.
kona49

Re: Virtual box doesn’t recognise my usb drive

Post by kona49 »

It looks as if all I have done is copied the file from my hd to usb stick.
I have been trying to follow a few guides from the net on how to convert the iso file to dmg using hdiutil.
Could someone kindly provide the definitive command line to carry this out, some of the guides seem to contradict each other or are not entirely clear to me.
A couple of the error messages I have had say, incorrect verb, or the location or destination does not exist.
I am making progress of sorts but I must be going wrong somewhere.
Very grateful for any help at all. Thanks.
pbear
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Re: Virtual box doesn’t recognise my usb drive

Post by pbear »

If the objective is to install Mate in VirtualBox the same as you did with Cinnamon (per earlier thread), there's no reason to bother burning to USB. VBox will read the ISO from hard drive using a virtual CD drive. In VBox, open Settings; fourth on the list is Storage; under Controller:IDE, select the next line, which is an icon for a CD; on right of dialogue box, you'll see a similar CD icon for Attributes; this is where you select the ISO you want VBox to use to boot the VM (virtual machine).

The reason you want a USB, as suggested in replies to the earlier thread, is so you can boot it directly rather than use VBox. This will give you a better sense of how well Mint works on your machine and will be necessary if you want to do a proper full install. Ironically, VBox may be the simplest way to burn the USB, as you already have VBox installed and have created a Mint VM. (By contrast, I don't use Mac but a little research suggests the hdiutil method is pretty complicated; see also the man page.) Notably, you can use your existing Cinnamon VM to burn the Mate USB.

To do this, make sure you have installed the extension pack, which enables VBox to access USB drives. Also, make sure you have enabled shared folders, so VBox can access the file location on your hard drive where the ISO is stored. (FYI, the reason you're getting an error message in the Cinnamon VM is a bug in the 5.2.22 guest additions ISO; this is fixable but there's no need for what you're doing here.) Now, boot the VM, attach the USB and manually claim it from the Devices: USB menu. Next, go to Menu: Accessories: USB Image Writer. Here, you will select the ISO you want to burn on the left drop-down and the target USB drive on the right. Click Write. Will take several minutes to run.

Shut down the VM; close VBox; power down the Mac. Try booting the USB. The method I've described definitely works (I just tested it to make sure), so if the USB won't boot there's some other issue. Hope that helps. Feel free to disregard if it's only adding to your confusion. Good luck.
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