I managed to resolve this problem. Doing online research, I first added the entry specified for OpenSuse not supporting USB that is mentioned in the VirtualBox FAQ. This entry goes in /etc/fstab, and is for device none usb. This caused my external usb hard drive to mount on startup automatically. I also added subfolders to /media for each drive that was not being mounted at startup. After I had reverting to the prefinal setup method, and did all updates, the ntfs partitions mounted on startup, but the ext3 partitions did not. I added entries to /etc/fstab for each unmounted drive, and changed the properties for the ext3 partitions from defaults to defaults,auto in the same table. That still did not mount them. So I edited /etc/init.d/mountall.sh and added ",ext3" to each of the two mount commands located there, and this finally worked after perfroming /etc/init.d/mountall.sh start (or following a reboot).. . I still had a problem with accessing the external usb hard drive in the guest OS, but finally realized that I had enabled support through /etc/fstab, but still had a USB filter in place for it in VirtualBox. So I removed the USB filter, and set the external drive up via shared folders. This worked. I had to change the properties on the none usb entry in /etc/fstab from =0664 to -0666 to enable write access to this drive.
And that is it. It even works better than my original efforts, since if the external hard drive is added or removed at any time, I get no errors from either the host or guest OS. I also found that if I wanted, I could add the subfolders to /mnt instead of to /media, in which case you can still access the drives, but they will not automatically appear as icons on the desktop. You just have to show the designated mountpoint as the second field in each entry in /etc/fstab. I also noted that /etc/mtab shows the drives that will be normally mounted if these changes are not made, but that this table apparently cannot be directly edited, as the system will crash if you try. It apparently will only accept a reboot command if that happens. And you can use the blkid command to see all the known partitions on your system. However, this does not show the block size used, and this may be a required entry at some point, so you can use the dumpfs [driveid] command for that information, but redirect it (>) to a text file so that you can see the pertinent information near the top of the list, as it is a verbose report and you will see it scroll off the top of the screen if you use the dumpfs [driveid] command by itself. I hope that is enough information to help someone else overcome the same problems. -- Ubuntu 8.04.1 & Sun VirtualBox Incompatibility https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/260192 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
