Enabling USB/Smart card reader on Virtualbox

Recently I got a new laptop at my work space, which has a smart card reader. I use virtualbox, and I needed the smartcard reader to work with my VM. But unfortunately I couldn't make it to work. I searched all around the web with the keywords like "Enabling smart card reader on virtualbox" and similar, but none of the posts solved my issue. The virtual box says the "device is busy". Then today after a week of searching, I found the solution by chopping of smartcard in my search keyword, and replacing with usb. So here is what solved my issue.


  1. Shutdown Virtualbox Machine. 
  2. If your usb device/smart card reader is external then you can just unplug it and skip this step. If your device is inbuilt then, In the device manager of host machine(the machine in which the virtualbox is installed), go to the "Smart card readers" section, right click on your usb/smartcard reader and disable it. In my case the card was "Alcor Micro USB".             
  3. Now go to your virtual machine settings. Click on "USB" from the left and click on little "+"(plus) icon on the right, and add the device, the name of the device may be different from the one in the screenshot. Most of the times the name has the words "EMV", "Generic". Select it, and click "OK".
  4. Now start your virtual machine. Once the "OS" is loaded and you have logged in, go the device manager of the host machine and enable the device(which you have disabled in step 2). 
  5. After the above step your virtual machine would most probably recognizes the card reader/usb device. 
  6. If for some reason the device failed to install on the virtual machine, I think you know what to do (Just download and install the driver for your usb/card reader).

If the above steps doesn't work, I am sorry as I cannot help further. I am no expert in Virtualbox, the above are the steps I followed, which worked for me. 

References: 
Virtualbox Forum: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=737



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