With Ubuntu 11.04 running as a VirtualBox VM on a Microsoft Windows 7 host system, USB devices are not visible to the guest Ubuntu instance. Community documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/USB says, "Add yourself to the user group vboxusers, then log out and back in." I found no group named vboxusers, so I created one and added my own account, logged out and back in. This had absolutely no effect.
Another source at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/running-ubuntu-11-04-natty-unity-3d-on-virtualbox-4-x.html suggested installing "Virtualbox guest additions," and said to "click on Devices->Install guest additions," which I could not find anywhere, in any menu of any application on either the host or guest systems.
As a last resort, I looked at the Virtualbox user manual. On this page http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128 it suggested the following procedure to install Virtualbox guest additions for Ubuntu:
apt-get updateand then...oops...point to the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere at all. Searching further, I found a thread on Ubuntu Forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=584763 where people were looking for this file. This thread also recommends opening the "Devices" drop-down menu in Virtualbox, but there is no such menu item. A thread on the Virtualbox forums at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7007 also recommends using this drop-down menu, which does not exist.
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install dkms
Finally, I found an answer at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=38548. The Virtualbox menu bar in the guest window does not appear when running in "scale" mode. Used host-C to get out of "scale" mode, and the menu appeared. (I had switched to scale mode early on, since the Ubuntu screen image does not fit inside its Windows window, and resizing the Windows window had no effect on the size or aspect ratio of the Ubuntu screen.) The option to install the virtual guest additions resulted in an iso file appearing as an external CD-ROM drive in the guest Ubuntu instance.
At that point, I ran the update and upgrade and installed dkms. Upgrade did quite a lot and took several minutes to run.
After following the instructions at http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128, the guest OS still did not see the USB drive. Virtualbox reported the error, "USB device ' ' with UUID {blah} is busy with a previous request. Please try again later," and under Details it gave the result code E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057) for component HostUSBDevice and interface IHostUSBDevice.
Next: Ubuntu 11.04 on VmWare Player with Windows 7 host
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