Error Reading Disk by XP Guest

[saltyseahag]

Hello!

I recently installed Virtualbox in order to play some old games I dug up. I'm using Virtualbox v. 5.2.20, and have not installed any add-ons or anything. My host is Windows 10 64-bit. The guest is running Windows XP 32-bit, and has default memory allocations (192 mb memory). The game in question is (or, should be...) compatible with XP, as well as 95 and ME.

The error I'm running into is that, whenever I try to actually launch the game, it tells me that it "Cannot locate the DVD-ROM" and to "insert the correct DVD-ROM and restart the application." However, the game icon shows up just fine; the game itself has a splash screen before launching (i.e., the little screen with "Play, Install, Uninstall, Read-Me" buttons) and moreover I was able to install the game files without any difficulty. Whenever I click "play," though, it thinks for a second before popping up with the error and cancelling the application.

The issue, as far as I can tell, is not that the drive is failing to recognize a disk at all, rather that it isn't properly reading the one that it knows is there...but only under some circumstances.

If it's relevant, the game has two discs; the second one is only used for installation (if selected, the "play" button is grayed out, so I'm sure about that!). I had some difficulty getting Virtualbox to recognize it, for whatever reason, so ended up copying an ISO image and redirecting the guest's optical drive to it for that portion of the installation. The guest's regular optical drive is the host's drive, and it is correctly set and recognizes the disc's presence. (Just covering my bases )

I've tried troubleshooting this but as it's kind of a specific setup and problem I haven't had much luck. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for the CD/DVD drives and the IDE/APTA drives, as well as creating new registry subkeys (all steps detailed in a help document that I don't seem to be able to link! It's Microsoft's "Your CD or DVD drive is not recognized by Windows or other programs"). If it's relevant, when I tried solution 5, fixing corrupt registry entries, I could find neither "UpperFilters" nor "LowerFilters." I am also definitely logged in as an administrator, fwiw!

I'm assuming the fact that it's a VM is preventing most of those from really working! Obviously, this isn't a matter of life and death or anything, but I'd appreciate any advice anyone has. This stuff isn't really my forte, so when Google runs out of ideas I get pretty stuck! Let me know if I should be providing any more specific information.

[socratis]

The guest's regular optical drive is the host's drive, and it is correctly set and recognizes the disc's presence

Does that mean that you enabled "Host CD passthrough" in the VM settings?

I can't see from the log that you attached, because it's the VBoxHardening.log, not the VBox.log, and even that you captured before the VM was completely shut down. We don't need a log at the moment, only if you own the actual CD and that the passthrough is enabled in the VM settings.

But, generally speaking, games were notorious for being involved in some weird trick to not allow CD copying. From an older thread:

Imaging is not appropriate if the CD is copy protected. All media copy protection schemes that I know of rely on having deliberately bad sectors on the media: the software will expect to get certain errors when it accesses those sectors. If you copy the media, and assuming the copier doesn't simply error out when it hits the bad sectors, then the copy will have good sectors in those locations - and the software will refuse to run. So, imaging is out, as is copying the files off the CD. In the case of a VM, if the VM hides host media errors then again the software will not run. The only solution is a tighter connection between the host hardware and the VM, hence the Passthrough recommendation.

See Perry's instructions above for enabling Passthrough.

Also, there are several threads of failed games to work properly inside a VM, CD protection being one of the factors... See for example "Windows 98 & the disc drive?".