Connecting a physical USB device to a virtual machine is sometimes tricky. Virtual machines are not really designed for physical interaction. In this case, it was necessary to mount a 1 TB external USB disk to a VMware virtual machine running Linux Mint 19.3. USB errors were seen and the disk would not connect. The fix was very simple.

Connecting the Disk

A USB disk was connected to a Linux laptop running VMware Workstation 15.5.1, and hosting a Linux Min 19.3 guest. When the connection “button” (at the bottom right of the VMware window) was pressed, these errors appeared in the guest’s kernel log: