I have a laptop and a desktop, both running Kubuntu. Each has a Windows 7 vm guest. When I plug an external hard drive (Seagate into the laptop, both the Linux machine and the vm can see it (not at the same moment, obviously). When I plug the same drive into the desktop, the vm sort of sees it and sort of doesn't. That is, the device shows up in the "Virtual Machine" menu list of "Removable Devices," but the Windows installation cannot seem to assign it a drive letter or use it. The message I get is that the USB device I've plugged in isn't recognized and that I should try reconnecting it or "replace the device." Reconnecting it does nothing, and since the other Windows vm can see it and work with it, I'm disinclined to replace the device.
I have checked the two vms' settings against each other, and they are identical. The only difference I can see is that the laptop is running VMware Player 6.0.5, and the desktop is running 7.0.0. Could that possibly explain the difficulty? I can always roll back to the earlier version, but it seems pointless to do that without knowing that the difference in versions is at least a candidate.
Thanks in advance for the help.