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This guide explains how you can access your USB flash drive from within Windows XP when you running within Sun Oracle VirtualBox on Ubuntu. By default it just seems that the virtual machine is unable to access any drives connected to the computer – but with an easy shared folder work around we are able to geat read and write access to the drive. This has only been tested on windows XP but we are fairly certain it would work just fine on windows 7 or vista. Additionally – this method will work with more than just flash drives, a hard drive, optical Disc Drive, cell phone or MP3 player will work as well.

1. Connect your USB drive and make sure you can access it from within Ubuntu.
2. Go to your virtual box instance of Windows and from the virtual box menu (that bar at the bottom of the screen if you happen to be in full screen mode) select Devices -> Shared Folders.
3. Click the little add button (with the green plus sign)
4. Select the drop down menu next to Folder Path and choose Other
5. Select your USB drive from the list of folders/drives on the left and click Open
6. Check off Make Permanent (and do not check off Read-Only)
7. Click OK

Alright so now the USB drive can be accessed from within windows. In order to get to the files simply follow the following few steps:

1. Click the windows Start Button.
2. Select Run
3. Type in: //vboxsrv
4. Press enter

You will now see a list of all folders/drives that are shared between windows and linux. For now you probably only have the one (which coresponds to your USB drive.) Open it up and you will have full access to the contents of your drive.