Recently I bought the XT Racing GPX Pro for my race bike. The software that it comes with is Windows only, so I installed it in a Windows 7 VM under VirtualBox on my OS X host.

Unfortunately, every time I connected the GPX Pro via USB to the Windows 7 VM, I got the following error from Virtual Box:

Failed to attach the USB device <b>Unknown Device</b> to the virtual machine Windows 7
Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: HostUSBDevice
Interface: IHostUSBDevice {173b4b44-d268-4334-a00d-b6521c9a740a}
Callee: IConsole {515e8e8d-f932-4d8e-9f32-79a52aead882}

Long story short, this is a relatively common problem with USB devices and VirtualBox and there is a simple solution. Connect your GPX Pro to your computer and then in VirtualBox, select your Windows VM and click the Settings icon at the top. Then select Ports and USB so you see this screen:

Click the Add Filter icon on the right side, and from the drop down, select the “XT Racing GPX Pro [0101]”. A new dialog will pop up with most of the fields filled out. You need to remove all of the data except for Name and Vendor ID like this:

When you’re all done, you should see this:

Basically, this filter tells VirtualBox to not let any XT Racing product attach to the host operating system (OS X or Linux) and automatically attach to the guest operating system (Windows). So now, boot up your VM and then connect your GPX Pro and you should be good to go!