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I successfully loaded VB on my Apple, checked VB ref the cd drive, placed the MSO XP cd in the cd drive and get the message "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System Halted."
Other forums have reference the same problem, but I cannot locate a simple explanation to resolve the issue.
I am not IT savvy and need a simple language version of what I may have done wrong and/or to the solution.

Just curious does the Guest settings, system, Enable EFI have a check mark in it?
If so try to remove it and see if you can boot.
Another thing to check is if the MD5 checks match?

I was having the same problem on my "Hackintosh" installing XP as the guest OS. I was installing via USB DVD drive with a JMicron ATA/USB adapter. Switched to a different adapter and voila!. The Hackintosh has trouble with JMicron controllers sometimes. Make sure you have chosen a CD drive in "Settings" and that it is "attached". Hope this helps.

I experienced the same issue today: FATAL no bootable medium found! System halted.

I created a VM for Windows XP on Max OS X Snow Leopard running Virtual Box 3.1.2.
I set the CD/DVD device under IDE controller (Storage tab) as "Host Drive Matsushita DVD-R" (my internal Mac DVD drive) but it remains as "Not attached".
I tried several options but cannot get it to work.
The CD with XP starts to spin when starting the VM but then above message appears.

Some more settings:
The slot states: IDE Secondary master (is that correct?)
When I put the mouse on the Host drive in the left pane it states: "Attached to: NOT attached"
How can I attach it? I have searched the user manual and several articles but cannot find what to do.

Any help is much appreciated.

I still did not manage to install any guest OS on Snow Leopard using Virtualbox 1.3.2.
I tried Windows 2000 as well as Windows XP. For both it just does not see the internal CD/DVD drive.
It then gives the FATAL: No bootable medium message. See my previous post (10-Jan-2010).

If I cannot get it to work then I will need to uninstall and use some old version of Virtualbox. A friend has been using 2.0 or 2.2 and has no issues. He too ran into the same issues when upgrading to 3.1.2.
So it seems to occur for fresh 3.1.2 installs as well as upgrades from older versions. He runs Leopard (I run Snow Leopard).

It looks to me that there is some bug in 3.1.2 with recognizing the internal Mac CD/DVD drive.
Also do not quite understand why there is no separate section anymore on CD/DVD. It is now under IDE controller - not sure why that was changed?!

Would really appreciate help with this!

Have you tried setting the CD/DVD passthrough to on in the guest settings?
You may want to post a ticket in bugtracker on this. Link is below my post.

I am dying here. I have a black MacBook running OS X Snow Leopard and am TRYING to load Windows XP Pro SP3 onto VB but keep getting the same error that everyone is complaining about; "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System Halted." Ive tried a verity of methods of shoving the darn CD/DVD into my MacBook and every darn time it just spits it out after the CD/DVD is taken in and spins for a min or so. I stuck the CD/DVD into an older PC that was running XP and it came right up so there is no issue with the CD/DVD. Has anyone figured this out? Grrrrrr.....

downwithbillgates wrote:I am dying here. I have a black MacBook running OS X Snow Leopard and am TRYING to load Windows XP Pro SP3 onto VB but keep getting the same error that everyone is complaining about; "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System Halted." Ive tried a verity of methods of shoving the darn CD/DVD into my MacBook and every darn time it just spits it out after the CD/DVD is taken in and spins for a min or so. I stuck the CD/DVD into an older PC that was running XP and it came right up so there is no issue with the CD/DVD. Has anyone figured this out? Grrrrrr.....

What does the MAC do if you simply put the CD/DVD in the drive and not have VirtualBox running? Does it still do the same thing?

My issue with "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted" seems solved.
I uninstalled Virtual Box and installed it again from scratch. Then - when creating a new VM I got the question if I wanted to install from CD/DVD or from floppy. I do not recall getting that message ever before the reinstall.
Next - at first - I still got the FATAL error, when trying to install Windows 2000. But it worked when installing XP. I now figured out that the Windows 2000 DVD that I was mostly trying to install is not bootable... (No AUTORUN.INF file).

So finally I managed to install XP. Steps I used:
1: New VM
2: Choose installation from CD/DVD
3: Check if there is an AUTORUN.INF on your Windows installation CD
4: Put the bootable installation DVD in Mac
5: Before starting the VM now check first if the DVD unit is attached to the VM
Settings - Storage - (for me it often displayed as "empty" below the IDE controller); select Host drive in the drop-down (right side screen)
6: For XP install I choose 512 Mb RAM and a harddisk size of 10 Gb.
It installed fine.

Good luck.

I am trying to boot an existing XP guest off the windows CD so I can run a repair installation, but the guest will not boot off either the CD or an iso image I made from it. With or without passthrough enabled for the CD/DVD device, the guest fails to boot from the CD with FATAL: No bootable medium found! message. I have another XP guest that also won't boot from the CD device.

Is this a bug with VB 3.1.4 on Mac?

mdahman wrote: Is this a bug with VB 3.1.4 on Mac?

It is possibly an intermittant bug, but I just performed the same install ( XP onto 3.1.4 on a MacBook Pro ) without a problem. I did get the 'FATAL' error the first time, because I hadn't slid the DVD in early enough, but once I gave it enough time to spin up, it worked flawlessly.