USB Passthrough in Hyper-V and Networking with Hyper-V and Sandbox

Question

Hi all,

I'm running into a couple of issues with Hyper-V, and I'm hoping someone can help me out with some guidance or troubleshooting tips.

USB Passthrough in Hyper-V

I'm trying to configure USB passthrough for a virtual machine in Hyper-V, but I can't seem to get it to work. From what I've read, Hyper-V doesn't support direct USB passthrough natively like other hypervisors (e.g., VMware), but I saw some workarounds that involve using Remote Desktop or Enhanced Session Mode.

However, I'm not sure if those are the best approaches, and I haven't been able to successfully access my USB devices in the VM using these methods. Has anyone had success with this? If so, what steps did you take to get USB passthrough working in Hyper-V? Or, if there’s a better workaround, I’d appreciate any advice.

Networking Issues in Hyper-V and Windows Sandbox

For some reason, networking doesn't seem to work in my Hyper-V VMs or even in the Windows Sandbox environment. The VMs are unable to connect to the internet or any local network. I've tried using both the default switch and creating an external virtual switch, but neither approach has resolved the issue.

Things I've tried so far:

• Checked the virtual switch settings (default switch and external switch)
• Verified that the physical NIC is working (networking works fine on the host machine)
• Disabled firewalls temporarily to test if that was causing the issue

Despite this, no luck getting networking to work. Has anyone encountered similar networking issues in Hyper-V or Windows Sandbox? Any troubleshooting suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

***moved from Windows / Windows 11 / Performance and system failures***

Answer 1

Not a storage device. Not visible in disk management.

Answer 2

It won't show up in disk manager because it is not a disk. There are other types of usb devices besides storage devices.

Answer 3

Hello,

You can try to take the USB device offline and then add it to the virtual machine. Refer to the following steps:

1. Open Disk Manager on the host.
2. Find your USB device in Disk Manager, right-click and select "Offline".
3. Launch Hyper-V Manager, right-click the virtual machine that needs to access the USB device in the main interface, and select "Settings".
4. Navigate to "SCSI Controller" in the pop-up window, select "Hard Disk", and click "Add".
5. Check "Physical Hard Disk", then select the USB device you connected, and click "OK" to let Hyper-V connect the USB device.

For the problem that the created virtual external switch has no network, I recommend that you refer to the following link to create a virtual external switch using commands.

HyperV - Identify network adapters - Microsoft Community

I hope the above information is helpful to you.

Best Regards

Zunhui

Answer 4

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. If USB is not enabled in the system setup (BIOS), it will not show up in the disk manager. You can go into the BIOS to enable it, refer to the following steps:

1. Restart the computer, and when the Windows logo just appears, long press the "F2" key (the key to enter BIOS varies for different motherboards) to enter the BIOS.
2. Use the arrow keys to select "Advanced" from the menu to find "USB Controller" and press "+" or "-" to change the setting to "Enabled".

Best Regards

Zunhui

Answer 5

Hi Chris MacPhee1,

Sorry for misunderstanding your specific needs. Currently, only RDP connection to the virtual machine and your host shared device is supported. You can refer to the following link and try again.

Share devices with Windows virtual machines | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards

Zunhui