How to remove all Virtual Media Manager optical disks from VirtualBox v6.1.22?

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ant
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How to remove all Virtual Media Manager optical disks from VirtualBox v6.1.22?

Post by ant »

I just noticed my brand new 64-bit W10 Pro PC's VirtualBox v6.1.22's Virtual Media Manager has a long list of optical disks (did they come from my many years old VMs that I copied over and used?) that were deleted long ago. How do I easily remove all of them instead of doing one by one?

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
Last edited by ant on 4. Jun 2021, 20:15, edited 1 time in total.
scottgus1
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Re: How to remove all Virtual Media Manager optical disks from VirtualBox v6.1.22?

Post by scottgus1 »

If the ISO's were deleted by normal operating system deletes instead of in the Virtual Media Manager, then the Media Manager will still know they were used but can't find them. The Media Manager reads each VM's .vbox file for the disks the VM has used. So each VM contributes to filling up the Media Manager's list of ISO's.

There is only one way to safely delete a reference to an ISO: Release and Remove it using the Media Manager's controls.

(One could manually edit the .vbox files to remove references to ISO's, but that requires careful handling of the XML tags, and that the Virtualbox VboxSVC service not be running. By the time manual editing is finished and double-checked, using the Media Manager might be finished more safely.)
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