USB ports, Networking

[jdbasho]

Since writing this, I took my Macbook into work and got some help. We plug in a USB key and also a USB drive and Windows recognized them fine (who knows what was happening before?)

We then switched the networking mode to "bridged." Then opened up a cmd window in Windows and issued a "ipconfig /release" and "ipconfig /renew" This solved the problem -- gave me a 'real' ip address on the network instead of the virtual one and I could see other devices on the network!

Thank you for all your help.

John

I wonder if anyone can help me: I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro with Leopard, installed Fusion 1.1 on it and Windows XP Pro. Everything seems to work fine except two things:

1) when I plug a USB device, there is no response from Windows. I was under the impression that Parallels Desktop and Vmware Fusion had all these USB issues resolved and am very surprised this does not work, so I'm presuming it's a setting I can change to resolve this.

2) Aside from Internet access (which is inherited from the host), I cannot establish any network connectivity. I can ping a computer on my network and I get a response, but I can not "see" any other computers on the network. I also cannot "see" my networked printers.

Because of 1) and 2), I have no access to any printers. I have tried sharing the Mac OS X printer using Bonjour for Windows, but no printers are there to be found in Windows this way.

I wrote a long explanation of these problems yesterday in several posts. Maybe 50 people have read them, but no one seems to have an answer to these things. Is it a Leopard thing? Should I be contacting VMware with a paid support call? I don't know how to resolve these issues.

Thank you for your help!

John Dean, Rochester,NY

Vmware Fusion Version 1.1rc1 (61385)

Running Windows XP Pro SP2

MacBook Pro Overview:

Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz

L2 Cache: 4 MB

Memory: 2 GB

Running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (9A581)

Wireless G Home Network (2 Win + 2 Macs)

Trendnet Wireless G Router

[rcardona2k]

Unfortunately USB port virtualization is not perfect. Virtual USB is tough (e.g. Microsoft never implemented it in VirtualPC) because the standard is complex (USB 1.1 v 2.0), emulating all the data modes (isochronous, bulk, interrupt, etc) are very timing dependent especially at the highest data speed. I'm not making excuses, just explaining some of the complexity, and then there are non-standard devices that depend on quirks either in the USB specification or in their software drivers. Each USB device to be used with virtualization should be fully exercised for compatibility. Sometimes a simple operation like synching will work but a more intense app like a usb modem won't. What kind of USB device you using?

As for networking, by using NAT networking you're inherently blocking some of the broadcast protocols used by Windows and similar network browsers. This is usually fixed by switching to bridged networking, or accessing machines in your network by their IPs, e.g. mounting a Windows server by using
dotted_ip_address. If you know the address of your print server you can usually add them by IP. I would try to discover your network resources using bridged networking, then after they're defined try switching back to NAT and see if they keep working.

As for contacting support, you can always try but troubleshooting usb devices is somewhat trial-and-error and dependent on access to physical devices. The networking issues you have should be more straight-forward to address, you can ask for help with those.

[808sin]

When attaching a Western Digital External USB drive to my MacBook Pro, Fusion 1.0 would recognize it (option to connect or disconnect) but it never mounts the drive so that I have access to it in Fusion. I installed MacDrive 7 to enable Windows Vista to recognize Mac formated hard drives but this didn't seem to help. I upgraded to Fusion Beta version 1.1. Fusion booted up and my drive was mounted temporarily. I began to work on it then Vista restarted on its own. When it was back up, I no longer had access to the USB drive. It is still being recognized (option to connect or disconnect) but does not mount.

Any suggestions?

Mark Deakos

Vmware Fusion Version 1.1rc1 (61385)

Running Windows Vista

MacBook Pro 15"

Model Identifier: MacBookPro2,2

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz

L2 Cache: 4 MB

Memory: 2 GB

Running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

[Fused2008]

I have exactly the same problem in Fusion as 808Sin. My usb drives are unmounted from MacOs to WinXP, this works fine. I can see WinXP installing drivers, so far so good. Then when I launch the Explorer to browse my usb devices in WinXP nothing is listed !! So I go to the WinXP device manager and I can see that my device is working perfectly and it recognised but it never appears in Windows Explorer. Any suggestions are welcome to solve this issue. I have a lot of USB devices that cannot sync in MacOs so I need to be able to sync them in WinXP.

Running Fusion trial version 1.1.3 on Alu Imac 2.8Ghz trying to connect various USB devices to sync music to such as a SONY Walkman, Blackberry Curve, Archos 605