"Hardware" modem on USB passthrough to WinXP?

[jdubin]

I'm using a whitebox ESXi 4.1 box (Intel DQ45CB with LSI SAS3041E-R RAID controller) with a few Windows 2000 Server VMs.  Everything works great.  But now I'm trying to setup a Windows XP VM which needs access to a modem.  I bought a Rosewill (aka Newegg) RNX-56USB 56k ("hardware") modem and planned to use USB passthrough to have the VM see it, but when I do so, the XP VM ends up in a loop of "detecting new hardware" -> "Device not recognized", over and over again.  VMWare tools are installed, and I've tried to pre-install the drivers for the modem, but the problem persists.  I don't believe this hardware is on the official compatibility list, but I'm hoping there's a solution in here somewhere.

Has anyone run into (and hopefully solved!) a similar problem?  Thanks!

[wobbe98]

I've done a simmilar setup and got it working.

I believe I loaded the drivers onto the system before "connecting" the modem.

I also needed to reconnect the modem a few time before the VM noticed the hardware.

And once it was reconized it took a really long time to install the USB modem/driver. A really long time but it eventually did work.

(I think it was an e-tech modem)

[idle-jam]

like the above, it's more on how the virtual machine would detect the device and i would troubleshoot like normal os client way. me too has resolved by doing multiple reboot/install and even getting the latest driver (if there is) from the manufacturer website. if you're on windows 7, chances is that it get detected and installed automatically.