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VMWare Workstation: high-speed USB 2.0 support vm

8 11 2008

Since couple days I am running Windows XP x64 and I wanted to scan some documents with my old Canon Lide scanner which is connected by USB cable on the host. Drivers are not supported in Windows XP x64 and therefore I am using a Windows XP 32bit virtual machine.

After connecting the scanner in Removable Devices I get the message below:

Please upgrade your virtual machine to enable high-speed USB 2.0 support for the device “Canon CanoScan”. An attempt will be made to connect this device to the best available host controller. This may result in an undefined behavior for this device

I did some research on the Internet and found some interesting posts. It looks like the virtual machine has an older version which does not support USB 2.0. I opened the vmx file with Notepad++and checked the virtualHW.version which was set to 4; the virtual machine has VMWare Workstation 4 hardware compatibility version set.

There are two ways to change the version:

Shutdown the virtual machine; click VM in the menu and choose “Upgrade or Change version”; follow the wizard and choose VMWare Workstation 6/6.5
Open the vmx file in Notepad and change virtualHW.version = “6.0″ and add ehci.present = “TRUE” to the configuration.

Getting done is how the virtualization at least helps me here. Scanner is now working.