An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb. Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.
If you’re getting this at boot, it is probably a left-over from forcing USB support in VirtualBox in Karmic and before. In Lucid Lynx 10.04, this line is no longer needed, and in fact causes this minor error – though, in some cases, it is actually rendering the system unbootable.
The solution is actually very simple and easy to implement, and merely requires removing or commenting out a line in the fstab file. To do so, open a terminal and enter:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
Find the line “none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=125,devmode=664 0 0” and either remove it or add a hash (#) to the beginning of the line to turn it into a harmless comment.
If you are in the worst case scenario and can’t get to your desktop at all, then at the command-line (which you can get to in Recovery mode) you’ll have to open fstab in a CLI-based text editor like nano with the command:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
(If using nano, Ctrl+X to exit, Y to confirm saving the changes, leaving the file name as “fstab“, then press Enter)
That’s it – your system should now boot fine.
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thanks……………………………
USB support in the VirtualBox not works now :(
Do you have Ubuntu 10.04? Most users only started getting this message after upgrading to Lucid Lynx, and for everyone removing that line fixed that issue… without affecting USB support in Virtualbox, since the support doesn’t need to be forced anymore. If you are running 10.04, make sure you have the latest (or most compatible) version of Virtualbox.
I have Ubuntu 10.04 and Virtualbox 3.1.8.
If I erase or comment the line “none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=125,devmode=664 0 0” Ubuntu starts normally, but I can not access any USB device in my guest machine in Virtualbox.
That’s weird, as I upgraded to 10.04 and after removing that line USB support is fine in my Windows guest. I’m still running Virtualbox 3.0.14 so seems like needing the latest version isn’t a factor. I have no idea why this is happening, so would be interested in the answer when you find out. At least you can still boot your PC and everything, and just have to be there to press S.
Thanks for your tip. It allowed me to fix the problem with my installation. I am running Xubuntu 10.04 on VirtualBox. The issue I ran into with the shares folder. I just commented out the line “/home/jerry/Shares Virtualbox vboxsf none 0 0” of the fstab file.
No problem. and glad I could help!
Thank you so much!
It worked.
I am seeing exactly what Anton and Wall-e reported here. Without the line there is no error message but Virtualbox doesn’t see the USBs. With the line I get the error but if press S both Ubuntu and Virtualbox see the USBs. I upgraded from Karmic to Lucid and I am using the latest Virtualbox version. Has anyone found something?
Seems like great advice – but how do I edit the file if my system will not boot? Ctl-Alt-F1 does not give me a full screen terminal either.
Perhaps I need to boot from a USB stick? Any guidance on how to set that up would be appreciated.
Try booting with an Ubuntu Live CD and editing the file that way. In previous versions, getting another Ubuntu partition mounted could be a bit of a pain (while it would automatically mount any Windows partitions without a peep), but these days it should present fixed ext3/ext4 partitions as mountable drives. At worse, you will have to manually mount your Ubuntu partition while using the Live CD (plenty of info on that via Google). Once the partition is mounted, you will then be able to edit the file. Hope that helps.
Thanks! For that issue I was able to use an earlier kernel (pressing ESC at boot to get grub menu) and then remounted the hard drive to get write access. Turns out there was some more sinister problem stopping booting though.
Did a reinstall from the (second burn of) a LiveCD. Now just dealing with Network-Manager continually dropping WIFI connection and wicd not connecting to the same network at all.
Worked great. Thank you very much!
just try adding “nobootwait” to the end of the options list on that line.. That should do it.