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Running VB 1.5.6 with XP Pro guest on Vista host and having trouble accessing CD-ROM drive.

While I can access the drive from windows explorer with no problem, other programs do not see the drive (specifically EZCDCreator). The program indicates the drive is already in use by "null". Device manager shows the following error:

"Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because there is a duplicate device already running in the system. (Code 42)"

I have installed Guest Additions and everything else is working fine. Any idea what can be done to resolve the error in device manager so that other programs can access the CD-ROM drive?

Thanks!

Since you are trying to use EZCDCreator (a program that tends to require direct access to the CDROM drive), did you enable PASSTHROUGH mode in the VirtualBox CD/DVD-ROM settings page?



Are you using a standard IDE CDROM drive or are you using a USB-based CDROM drive? An IDE CDROM drive should work just fine, but some USB-based drives may have issues in a VM as they don't use the ATAPI driver IIRC.

Bit.

Thanks for the quick reply BitBasher! Yes, I have paassthrough enabled and have tried with both a USB and IDE CDROM, same results all the way around. I know EZCDCREATOR is an outdated program, but there is NOTHING available for Vista (or XP) that works as easily as it does for QUICKLY burning multi-session discs. I have the setup working fine in VMWare, but was hoping to not have to drop $200 to be able to use this one program...

I'll keep reading around but have to use VMWare for the moment as my work is stacking up since I have spent the past two days trying to get a working VM setup so I can dump this old box and clear me some legroom!

VMWare server is free. You can also try Nero Burning ROM, works just fine with multisession discs. If you think Nero is too large these days, you might want to check on Nero Lite and Nero Micro. Those are custom builds of the installer that have a lot of bloatware removed from the installer. It isn't maintained and supported by Nero itself, but works just great.

Thanks Sasquatch, I had forgotten about the free VMWare server (going to check that out now)...

As for Nero, I have tried that and every other burner I could find. None make the process of appending at least 50+ multi-session discs in a row as seamless as EZCDCreator. When working with this many CDs, an extra click here or there to get things going really adds up!

I've had trouble with passthrough enabled too, where it gives me 2 separate drives, and one of them is always detected as an audio CD. I didn't do much testing, but I did find that the other drive read data fine most of the time, but I think the insert/eject notification was goofed up too. It was buggy enough that I saw no need to test burning because I was already dissapointed in the unreliability. I don't really recommend passthrough right now because of the problems I've had with it, but if it works then go for it.

I've had much better luck with a USB DVD burner. I used Nero 7.7 and had no problems burning CDs in a DVD burner. I don't have a USB burner myself to thoroughly test, but it seems to work better this way for me.

So has anyone had any luck resolving this issue? I'm new to virtualbox and I've been messing with this issue for a few days off and on. No luck though.