virtualbox.org

I've got a brand-new installation of VB 3.0.6 on Vista, with a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I can't mount a .iso. Virtual Box thinks it's mounted, but in Ubuntu, the /media/cdrom directory is empty. When VB thinks no .iso is mounted, the Ubuntu File Browser shows a CD-DVD drive icon. As soon as I mount a .iso file, the icon disappears.

I see no messages in the Virtual Box log, and I'm not sure which log to check in Ubuntu.

You can see if a CD-ROM is mounted in Linux if you open a terminal and issue the mount command. You can manually mount it too, although HAL should do that for you when you insert a CD. Does an ISO mount properly in a different VM, like Jaunty?

For the behaviour you see in Karmic, it's quite possible it's a bug in the OS, not VB. Remember, it's still in alpha state, and official support will not come until it's final. All development releases are not officially supported.

I'm struggling with a similar problem with 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. The host is OSX 10.5.8 on an intel MacBookPro. The guest is the Ubuntu. My version of VirtualBox is 3.06r52128. There are hints scattered around the web going back as far as 2007, but nothing has yet worked for me. I'm happy to give more details and/or try suggestions as requested.

In the guest, Ubuntu, both /dev/cdrom and /dev/scd0 are links to sr0. Some of the fixes I've seen focus on getting these links right. Others focus on making sure the user is part of the right groups (something like "vboxuser") but there are no such groups on my guest-ubuntu.

I _love_ virtualbox. Having ubuntu running in virtualbox in seamless mode makes life worth living. Getting the cdrom to work properly in the guest will be that much better.

phaedral, mounting the CD after you added it to the VM doesn't work? So after you mount it to the VM, open a terminal and enter mount /media/cdrom.

sasquatch, thanks! The mount command worked for me. Not sure why it is needed, or why the instructions don't include it, but it's all good now. Thanks.

nedbatchelder wrote:sasquatch, thanks! The mount command worked for me. Not sure why it is needed, or why the instructions don't include it, but it's all good now. Thanks.

Like I said, HAL should do that for you automatically, but it seems there is a bug in it or something that doesn't trigger the auto-mount. Don't forget to umount it after you're done . umount /media/cdrom. You always have to do it this way (mount and umount) if HAL doesn't work or when you're not running X.