USB Problem - Did Everything Still a #FAIL! Please Help!

[BobRaz]

Long story short but I accidentally unplugged my two external hard drives from my Mac while running a Windows XP virtual machine. Before this happened, the drives worked reliably on my Mac and on my VM and I never had any problem (I use a hub - but see below that's not the problem).

Now each time I plug them in, they are correctly read by my Mac (and by another PC), but in the VM I get an error message stating that the device is unable to connect to its ideal host, as below:

The USB device is not recognized, as below:

and:

I spent about 6 hours trying to fix this problem to no avail; here is more info below:

1. MacOS 10.13.2
2. VMWare Fusion 10.1.1
3. VMware Tools 10.0.12
4. I use a powered USB hub with six ports, my guess is that's why in the screenshot above, we see six 'unused ports'
5. The problem persists even if I plug the USB drives directly in the Mac
6. The problem now happens with any USB disk or drive, even those which were not plugged at the time of the incident.
7. All the drives and disks work on the Mac and on other PC.
8. I even fired up a clean VM from a back-up (Windows XP) and the problem persists even with that generic 'untouched' VM!
9. I reinstalled VMWare Fusion (did a complete uninstall using Clean My Mac 3) and the problem persisted!
10. Solutions that did not work:
    • Reinstalling VMWare Fusion
    • Formatting one of the drives
    • Reinstalling VMWare tools
    • Removing USB controller from the VMWare Fusion settings, then reinstalling the controller
    • Reducing the USB compatibility to USB 1.1, USB 2.0 from the VMWare Fusion settings
    • Under System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General tab, nothing is blocked
    • Within Windows XP, deleting the driver and trying to reinstall it
    • Within Windows XP, trying to update the USB driver
    • All of the above directly were tried multiple times, both while using the hub and plugged directly in the Mac
    • Everything that would apply to my problem from a bunch of posts (this article, this one, this other less relevant one, and some others)

Points #8 and #9 above make me think this may be tied to MacOS? Yet if so, how come the drives work flawlessly when used directly on the Mac instead of on the VM (they work flawlessly either plugged into the Mac directly or via the hub)?

PS: these are the USB services that are running:

Please help!

[wila]

Hi,

Can you try the solution provided in this post?

USB devices no longer recognised on VMWare Fusion 10

Note that it has a very (VERY) weird workflow for allowing the USB kernel extension.

--

Wil

[BobRaz]

Thank you for this.

Not sure what 'open but do not run' a VM means? It means selecting it by just clicking on it? In the VMWare Fusion Library view?

Anyway I tried this several times (do I have to uninstall Fusion and re-install?) but I never had an 'allow' button in the Privacy panel. So it's a No Go for me.

[wila]

Hi,

The way I read that is by using the menu "File -> Open"

--

Wil

[BobRaz]

Thanks for the further information. Unfortunately that did not work.

I however managed to copy one of my VM (remember, I have two VM showing the same problem) to a colleague's computer, on another instance of VMWare Fusion, and the problem was still present!

That makes me conclude:

• VMWare Fusion did something to both VM, corrupted something in their packages.
• What was corrupted has specifically to do with external storage devices, as random USB keys will present that same problem when getting plugged into the VM, but other USB devices (say, a pointing device) will work perfectly fine.

As I wrote before, I tried the "remove USB Controller" from the USB & Bluetooth settings in the VM's Settings panel (in Fusion), and re-add the USB Controller, and that did not work. Is there anything else I could do, in the VM package, to completely reset USB for the storage devices?

HALP!