If you’ve come across this already then this might be obvious, but in order to mount a USB external drive on an Ubuntu VirtualBox guest running on a Mac OS X host, you need to unmount the drive in Mac’s Finder first. Then using either click the USB icon in the status bar in your Ubuntu guest and you’ll see the drive un-greyed out (when it’s mounted on the Mac it appears greyed out and you can’t select it) – click it and it will mount automatically. Or you can do the same thing from the VirtualBox menu, Devices/USB.