drivers for virtual devices

[myd0j0]

On an Ubuntu 10.10 host installation with vb 4.0.2 r69518 and using WinXP Professional SP3 as guest, the first time I booted up xp, it attempted to install the drivers for the virtual devices, but was unable to. In xp device manager, I see that the vbox cd-rom, base system device and video controller (vga compatible) are detected but without drivers. I get the idea these drivers are not like a typical device driver you just download from the manufacturer and install...so how can I get these installed?

All i found in the guide was that the vbox image would boot, the guest os would detect the changes and automatically load the drivers...which was not successful.

If this has already been answered, my apologies, but my google and forum searches were not successful.

[fixedwheel]

install the "Guest Additions", see VBox manual => http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html

[myd0j0]

Thanks for the quick reply, fixedwheel. I've got a couple screen shots of what I was trying to explain; I have used and tried to follow the guide but something is not going right--I never get access to the cdrom in order to be able to install the guest additions...

As you can see in the "screenshot.png" screen shot, the guest additions iso is loaded into the IDE primary slave, but when I boot the guest, there is no cd-rom available to load the drivers for the virtual hardware, even though I clearly have a cdrom (as listed under the IDE of the storage section). I do get the windows hardware wizard, but no means to get the drivers.

I did open the guest additions ISO with my handy archive manager and extracted all the 32 bit windows files, but of course my webmail won't allow me to attach exe files--even if in an archive and encrypted. I went and opened a yahoo mail account which didn't care about the file types sent the files to myself so I could get them into the guest os.

Per the second screen shot which just shows the vbox window with guest os, at this point I was able to install mouse, video and base system. I haven't been able to install shared folders or the driver for the cdrom. I also ran the VBoxDrvInst.exe file, which seemed to have no affect.

Any ideas on working around this problem? My primary issue is the shared folders--when I created the virtual disk off my old XP machine, the properties for "My Documents" pointed to another drive--several gigs of docs are currently unable to be used in xp.

Thanks again, fixedwheel!

[myd0j0]

A new update...

I re-installed the guest additions and now have the mouse integration and shared folders working. The only thing not working is the vbox cd-rom. In looking through the few things around the net I found, it appeared there might be a question as to where the host might be mounting the rom as opposed to where the vm is looking for it?

anyway, the cd-rom on the physical machine is at /dev/sr0 and with a disc is getting mounted at /media/blahblah

thanks for any assistance!

[fixedwheel]

Hi,

... The only thing not working is the vbox cd-rom. ...

how to mount is somewhere hidden in the VBox storage settings of the virtual machine


is that what you are looking for?