SOLVED: USB Drive Won't Connect Under OSX and Fusion

I've had a situation where I installed Ubuntu 11 under OSX Lion running VMWare Fusion 3 and I could not get my USB drives to connect to Ubuntu. There have been quite a few threads on this with people perplexed at why lsusb would show the drive as connected, but fdisk never showed the drive.

After a bunch of searching, I found the solution and I wanted to pass it along. This time configuring and re-configuring Ubuntu won't help. It's a VMWare / OSX issue.

Problem: Installing OSX Lion causes the permissions of the root directory ( / ) to be set incorrectly.

Fix: reset the permissions of ( / ) by running these commands:

chown root:wheel /
chmod 755/

Now restart your Mac. With any luck, USB drives will now mount.

Here are the official details from VMWare (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mic...rnalId=2004687)
or
(http://tinyurl.com/77kfk2l)

Good Luck!

Steve