USB Drive access from Hyper-V machine

Question

Goal:
Give Virtual Machine access to a USB thumb drive.

I have a Win10 Pro laptop.
I loaded Hyper-V and created Win XP Virtual Machine.
Windows XP was installed with no issues on the Virtual Machine.
When I plug in a USB thumb drive into the laptop, Win10 finds the drive with no issues.
When I start the Win XP VM, it does not show the USB thumb drive.

I have tried selecting the Settings for the VM, under Hardware, I selected SCSI Controller.

Then I select Hard Drive and hit the Add button.

This causes the dialog to change giving me access to a couple of parameters.

However the "Physical hard disk" option is greyed-out.

My research into this has led to launching the Disk Management dialog for the Win10 Pro Laptop.

My thumb drive appears as Disk 1.

When I right-mouse click on the Disk 1, there is no option to set the drive to Offline.

I looked at Disk 0, which is the laptop's main C-Drive, a right-mouse click on Disk 0 does show an Offline option.

Again, more research offered many techniques, that did not work.

I have not been able to find any solution that will work.
I don't know where else to look.

I also don't know what else to try.

Can someone assist?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi，

Please try the following steps.

1. Open Disk Management on the host, right click on your USB disk and select Offline.
2. Add the physical hard disk to the Virtual Machine in Hyper-V Manager.
3. If the "Physical hard disk" option is still greyed out, restart the VMMS service to allow Hyper-V to recognize the offline disks.
4. Enable the enhanced session mode in connection.
5. Start the virtual machine and open Disk Management inside the virtual machine to check the passthrough USB disk.

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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