How to make smooth USB access available to Virtualbox vm

[Manish Jain]

Hi,

I am running VirtualBox under FreeBSD 10.2 amd64. I created a Windows XP 
vm for some work I need to do. The vm needs data which I placed on a USB 
pen drive. I added a filter under VirtualBox to pass the pen drive to 
the vm and then started the vm. The pen drive for some reason is not 
smoothly visible to the vm - the icon for removable drive in the vm 
keeps coming and going every 1-2 seconds. I think the problem is the 
Gnome3 desktop environment and VirtualBox are competing for the USB pen 
drive. On the host FreeBSD system, I repeatedly get error messages 
"Unable to mount volume" - some error related to HALD. I tried setting 
hald_enable="NO" in /etc/rc.conf and then rebooted FreeBSD. Upon 
restart, the situation remains the same - the vm does not see the pen 
drive long enough for the data to be copied out.

Can someone please help me ? What I want is that the pen drive is under 
the control of VirtualBox, with no interference from the desktop 
environment.


Thanks for any help.

-- 
Regards

Manish Jain