I recently installed VirtualBox configured internet connection to the internet for a virtual windows 7 machine I’ve installed using Vagrant, tried to setup USB, but got the following message: “Failed to save settings – Empty or null HostOnly interface name is not valid.”. Looking at the details, I saw the following “Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005) Component: NetworkAdapterWrapper …”.I don’t remember when I started to get that popup message. Couldn’t find any HostOnly adapter using the VirtualBox GUI. Finding the solution in the web is too hard. and I can’t find anything in the user guide either. But, one useful thing I know: in Linux and Unix-like system, I can find configuration files. They are usually found in directories whose names begin with ‘.’. followed by the program’s name or under “${HOME}/.config’ or directories created by the software. This time, the file was found in “${HOME}/VirtualBox VMs/<machine-name>”.
In this case: “${HOME}/VirtualBox VMs/windows7_default_1563689015423_90469/”. In this directory there are files with the suffix ‘.vbox’. They are XML files. In one of them, named “windows7_default_1563689015423_90469.vbox”, I find the following element:
<Adapter slot="1" MACAddress="08002718154D" cable="true" type="82540EM">
<DisabledModes>
<InternalNetwork name="intnet"/%gt;
<NATNetwork name="NatNetwork"/>
</DisabledModes>
<HostOnlyInterface name="VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #2"/>
</Adapter>
Comment it out.
Problem solved.