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9 Replies Last post: Jun 4, 2009 1:59 PM by wandro
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Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more

May 29, 2009 7:36 AM

Click to view wandro's profile Novice wandro 7 posts since
Nov 13, 2007

After I had installed the Prolific Vista USB to serial driver software (PL2303_VistaDriver_Setup.exe) on my Vista Home Premium VM (installed with VMware Fusion on an iMac), I could successfully use it to read GPS track data from my Garmin Etrex H device. But after a suspend/resume or restart of my Vista VM the Prolific USB port could not be reconnected to the VM, neither automatically, nor manually through the Vitual Machine menu (USB, or Settings).

Uninstall/reinstall of the Prolific driver first helped temporarily 2 or 3 times, now it seems to be completely impossible to get it to work again.

The same driver works fine on a native (bootcamp) installation of Vista on a second iMac.

Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 29, 2009 10:28 AM
Click to view etung's profile Guru etung 11,027 posts since
Oct 15, 2006 VMware
If you shutdown and start the Vista virtual machine, does your device work? If you shutdown the virtual machine and the Mac, then start them both, does the device work?
Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 29, 2009 11:49 PM
in response to: etung
Click to view wandro's profile Novice wandro 7 posts since
Nov 13, 2007

No, restarting the Vista VM or both MacOS and Vista VM doesn't help.

Particularly conspicuous is the following fact:

If I open the "Settings -> USB" dialog while the Vista VM is running, a list of USB ports, containing "Prolific USB to serial: connect", is displayed, and if I check the check box left of the Prolific entry, then the check mark becomes visible for quite a short moment and then disappears again.

Perhaps I should mention that I have also installed the USB-to-serial adapter driver of Apple on MacOS. Could this conflict with the VM? But it is a bit awkward and error-prone to deinstall it, and I should prefer to have at least the Mac GPS software as long as the Windows GPS software isn't working.

Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 30, 2009 8:58 AM
in response to: wandro
Click to view etung's profile Guru etung 11,027 posts since
Oct 15, 2006 VMware
If I open the "Settings -> USB" dialog while the Vista VM is running, a list of USB ports, containing "Prolific USB to serial: connect", is displayed, and if I check the check box left of the Prolific entry, then the check mark becomes visible for quite a short moment and then disappears again.
Perhaps I should mention that I have also installed the USB-to-serial adapter driver of Apple on MacOS. Could this conflict with the VM?

Yes! If an application or driver in OS X is holding onto the device, we will fail to connect it to the virtual machine with the symptoms you describe. You can check this by enabling USB logging as in Information Gathering for VMware Fusion and looking for the error code "e00002c5" - I suspect it will be in the log.
Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 30, 2009 12:14 PM
in response to: etung
Click to view wandro's profile Novice wandro 7 posts since
Nov 13, 2007

The error code appears in the log file, indeed.

I have then deleted the network device in the Mac network settings, but that didn't suffice.

I had to completely uninstall the Apple USB-to-serial driver. Then I could successfully use the Prolific Vista driver in the Vista VM again.

Many thanks, so far. But isn't there a way to avoid uninstalling the Apple driver? Can I perhaps release the Apple USB port temporarily? If not, then I'll probably prefer the Mac GPS software and dispense with the Windows solutions.

Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 30, 2009 8:26 PM
in response to: wandro
Click to view etung's profile Guru etung 11,027 posts since
Oct 15, 2006 VMware
But isn't there a way to avoid uninstalling the Apple driver? Can I perhaps release the Apple USB port temporarily?

That's a function of the driver, and isn't something we can control or affect.
Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 31, 2009 3:41 AM
Click to view woodmeister's profile Enthusiast woodmeister 39 posts since
Jul 12, 2008
It seems that there is something on the Mac side that is trying to "grab"
the device. Although I use an XP VM, I use the dame device without
issue. As a matter of fact, I have used the device with Minicom on the
Mac side with XP VM running, quit minicom, attach the adapter to
the XP VM, and then run Hyperterm without a problem.

I also do similar things with a Linux VM without an issue, although the
Linux drivers seem pretty crappy.

So I think you may have some other app or driver grabbing the adapter
on the Mac side. You may want to investigate this possibility. This may
or may not be easy to find since there are some applications that have a driver
load at boot time even though the application itself is not running.
Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more May 31, 2009 9:43 AM
in response to: woodmeister
Click to view wandro's profile Novice wandro 7 posts since
Nov 13, 2007

Thank you for your response. I'm afraid it won't help me if I find the reason of the troubles since I can't influence the behavior of drivers or applications loading those drivers.

I can use the Windows-based GPS software on our second iMac where Vista is running natively under bootcamp.

I just wanted to inform VMware in order to enable them to fix this annoyable behavior that doesn't occur in a native Windows installation.

Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more Jun 1, 2009 2:50 AM
in response to: wandro
Click to view woodmeister's profile Enthusiast woodmeister 39 posts since
Jul 12, 2008
The sad thing is, if it is OSX that is grabbing the device, there is nothing
Fusion can do to change anything. It must be OSX that must release the device or driver.
Reply Re: Prolific USB to serial driver: USB port cannot be connected to my Vista VM any more Jun 4, 2009 1:59 PM
in response to: wandro
Click to view wandro's profile Novice wandro 7 posts since
Nov 13, 2007
In the meantime I have recognized that Prolific has a USB to serial driver also for OSX. I've installed it instead of the Apple driver, and now I can successfully use both, the Prolific Windows and the Prolific OSX driver, alternately.
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