Feature Request: Virtual USB Hard Disk Support

[rainbow]

Please add support for virtual USB hard disk drive images.

Imagine this. If your guest operating system is Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista and if you have enabled USB support, in the Settings section, there would be a option to either mount a virtual hard disk image and use it as a emulated USB port or use one of the existing physical USB devices and go from there.

This feature would be perfect if you're planning on running multiple guest operating systems and that you want to share some files between one and the other, but don't want to set up a network drive to share folders with or shutdown the guest operating system upon transfering files.

USB virtual hard disk drives would also be used as a backup disk too. :D

You see, QEMU is the only PC emulator to use virtual hard disk drives as a emulated USB device.

For more information about this feature, please see this thread: ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9537

[Fluturel]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. This would be a great thing.
Please add this in the later versions.

Thank you.

[rainbow]

Replying to fluturel:

Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. This would be a great thing.
Please add this in the later versions.

Thank you.

Exactly!

You're welcome for the comment, btw.

[Technologov]

A related wish found: #6843

-Technologov

[BobC]

There is an important use-case for this feature: Sharing host files with guests that do not have Guest Additions installed and are not able to access/use network shares/mounts.

Yes, such systems exist! For example, images of embedded systems that don't run Linux or Windows and don't use the network, but are able to mount generic USB storage and HID devices.

My current work-around is to have a physical USB thumb drive on my system that I copy host files to, mount on the guest, add/modify files, unmount from the guest, then access with the host. A very short-distance version of sneaker net!

[Frank Mehnert]

Actually what you describe is implemented in VBox 5.0.x! See the user manual section 5.1: Attach a USB MSD controller to your VM.

[jelabarre59]

Replying to frank:

Actually what you describe is implemented in VBox 5.0.x! See the user manual section 5.1: Attach a USB MSD controller to your VM.

Yeah, I read that section, and other than saying you could maybe kinda sorta do something with USB under EFI, it gives absolutely ZERO practical information. I dabbled with the settings, it doesn't really say much.

In addition, we *also* need support for virtualized USB devices (in the same way HDDs are virtualized now).