virtualbox wont show USB ports in the guest OS

[Joep L. Blom]

Graham Watkins wrote:
> Jack Wallen wrote:
>> Joep,
>>
>> Have you done the following (I am cutting an pasting from an article I
>> wrote on ghacks.net):
>>
>> Configure USB
>>
>> Now it’s time to configure the system to allow USB support. You have to
>> get the user ID of the vboxusers group. To do this issue the following
>> command:
>>
>> grep vboxusers /etc/group
>>
>> which will report something like:
>>
>> vboxusers:x:123:
>>
>> What you need to now do is add a line to the /etc/fstab file. This line
>> will be (if we stick with the user ID report you see above):
>>
>> none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=664 0 0
>>
>> With that file saved you are ready to reboot and start up VirtualBox
>> with USB support.
>>
>>
>>   
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>>
>> to that Jack Wallen says:
>>
>>
>>
>>   
> If you have done all that is suggested above there are 2 further points
> worth looking at.  If your USB devices are shown greyed out in
> Virtualbox configuration, it may be the case that they need to be
> unmounted in Ubuntu before Virtualbox is started as they can't be shared.
> 
> The other point is that there seems to be some sort of bug in Windows XP
> that prevents the USB drivers from being installed properly even when
> Virtualbox shows the devices as being available.  This is corrected when
> XP Service Pack 2 is installed.  I did that and the USB drivers then
> installed correctly and my flash drives were available under Windows.
> 
> Not a lot of people know that.  At least nobody told me.
> 
Graham,
Thanks. I didn't think of unmounting the USB devices in ubuntu as in my 
hardy system (the problems are on jaunty) the USB devices work for the 
most part well (an exception is an USB disk-drive but that's not 
important). The XP I use has Service pack 2 already installed, at least 
it says so on the disk pack. But I will explore it. Thanks again for the 
alert.
Joep