You can see the info balloon near the system clock mentioning a new VirtualBox USB device. In this moment, VBox will activate the USB integration process. Be careful here not to choose your keyboard or mouse or you will effectively lock yourself! In my example, this is the one named Generic Mass Storage. From the newly opened drop-down menu, find your USB disk. While your VM is running, choose the option USB from the menu Devices. By the way VBox will emulate all USB standards for your VM – 1.1/2.0/3.0. You can redirect the USB device only if the guest OS supports the USB connections. We don’t want to spare 2-3 GB of the precious disk space on our SSD drive, even the virtual HDD (or VHD in short) is the file on that same disk. Let us assume that we want to install some specific software onto the VM. So, you can access that drive and work with it. When we connect the USB pen drive (or USB flash drive) to the host system, its operating system will recognize this device and enable it for usage. After the redirection, this disk will be the local VM disk, which we can use like any other disk. Oracle VirtualBox (VBox) has this cool feature. The best solution would be if we can use the data from the local disk, but inside the VM.

Even the virtual network is still slower than the direct disk access. This is even more important if you’re using an SSD drive in your computer.Īdditionally, we don’t want to use the network for such access, as it will be slow. While we can copy information and even files using the features Shared clipboard and Drag and drop, we don’t always want to duplicate data. Often, we will need to copy some information, maybe configuration data or files between our host computer and VMs. Today, in everyday work, we need to exchange some information between computers. Although VMs are not real machines, they are computers, too.

Virtualbox boot from usb device