Windows 7 guest in VirtualBox doesn't recognize USB 3.0 device

I have had a few hiccups during the process but I finally have everything up and running. Here I will lay details on how I managed to get my guest machine set up so that it can access my USB devices.

1. First I installed VirtualBox usingapt-get install virtualbox

2. Next I downloaded and installed Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.40-115130.vbox-extpack and VBoxGuestAdditions_5.0.40.iso from the VirtualBox official download page.

   Note that, depending on the version of VirtualBox you are running, you need to get the appropriate extension pack and guest additions.

3. Now you need to add the current user to the vboxusers group using the following command:

   sudo usermod -aG vboxusers "$USER"
   

   This command adds the current user to the vboxusers group. If you wish to add other users to this group substitute $USER for the username of the desired user.

4. Up to this point you should be able to use USB 2.0 devices on your guest machine by accessing the “Devices” → “USB” menu from your guest machine. In my case this selection was enough, but sometimes there can be problems if the device is not unmounted properly from the host before loaded into the guest OS. If this is the case, in the USB settings section you can create a USB filter for the device which will load it automatically in your guest OS once it is running.

5. In the case of Windows 7, USB 3.0 drivers are not installed with the OS and require manual installation. They can be found here. In my case the drivers that worked were the ones dated 2/3/2014, the more recent drivers were not compatible with my guest OS.

After this my USB 3.0 devices worked perfectly in my guest OS.

Special thanks to Eduardo Baitello for his assistance.