USB controller and network devices keep disappearing

[fuzzy-wan]

A client of ours with a MacBookPro8,2 (Early 2011) and Fusion 3.1.2 keeps "losing" her VM's USB controller. It's happened three or four times now. When she goes into the Virtual machine menu, there's no USB submenu.

So, each time she has to shut down the VM, go into Virtual Machine > Settings > USB Devices and click on Add USB Controller, a fairly annoying process.

This sometimes happens to the Network Adapter as well, and I think the Sound Card disappeared once...

Any thoughts on why this is happening? Obviously a bit hard to diagnose since I don't have access to her machine (I have a copy of her VM here, but I'm not seeing the problem at my end so far).

[fuzzy-wan]

Mystery solved, I think.

Turns out she's accustomed to ejecting USB drives from Windows' "Safely Remove Hardware" thing ... and if she's not sure which entry corresponds to the drive in question, she takes a guess. Apparently, sometimes she guesses wrong and ejects the USB controller and/or network adapter instead.

Is there a way to keep the VM from listing those devices as removable? (I mean, does anyone really need to eject their USB controller?)

Failing that, she'll have to train herself to use the Virtual Machine > USB menu to eject drives, I guess. Or just yank the @#$% things like everybody else does. :smileysilly:

[WoodyZ]

Is there a way to keep the VM from listing those devices as removable? (I mean, does anyone really need to eject their USB controller?)

Add the following parameter to the target Virtual Machine's .vmx configuration file.

devices.hotplug = "FALSE"

Note that adding this does not stop from having normally expected items show as in just the external devices (to the Virtual Machine) show when they are attached.

Have a look at: Editing the .vmx file for your Fusion virtual machine