How to Fix “Failed to Enumerate Host USB Devices” Error in VirtualBox on Ubuntu

This tutorial explains how to fix the "Failed to enumerate host USB devices" error that occurs in VirtualBox on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

The full error message you may see in VirtualBox is:

Failed to enumerate host USB devices.
VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to the 'vboxusers' group.

Solution (Restart Required)

The solution is to add yourself to the vboxusers group. Run the following command in the terminal:

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers "$USER"

After running the command, restart your system for the changes to take effect.

Note: Any user on the computer who uses VirtualBox needs to be a member of the vboxusers Linux group.

This will fix the "Failed to enumerate host USB devices" error.

Install VirtualBox Dependency Packages

This is not directly related to the previous error, but you should install the following dependency packages to prevent further issues:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)

The above packages need to be installed on your Ubuntu system to properly install Guest Additions and to prevent errors like "VirtualBox Linux kernel driver is either not loaded or not set up correctly."