Is it possible to mount more then one CD/DVD drive?

catacaustic · Post by **catacaustic** » 19. Feb 2008, 01:20

This is my first post as a new member, and after searching the forums here and the docs I can't find an answer to this question.

What I am looking for with this feature is that I'm running a Fedora host that has two DVD's installed in it, with a Windows guest, and I want to use the CD/DVD authoring and copying software that only runs on windows. This isn't a problem so far, but it would be a whole lot better if I could copy from disc-to-disc instead of having to read everything into memory first.

Is there a way of mounting two (or more) CD/DVD drives like this, or is this a feature that just hasn't been included yet for whatever reason?

catacaustic · Post by **catacaustic** » 21. Feb 2008, 08:36

OK, has no one else ever wanted this sort of feature? What about being able to add a second hard drive to a virtual machine? I'd guess that'd be related to the same issues here.

Is this something mysterious that there's no answer to?

pedlo · Post by **pedlo** » 21. Feb 2008, 09:13

The first thing that comes in my mind is trying to install Daemon Tools in the guest Windows machine, so you can mount CD/DVD images you can pick from shared folders. But this won't enable you to do disc-to-disc copy, will just increase number of virtual drives in the guest.

catacaustic · Post by **catacaustic** » 27. Feb 2008, 08:45

pedlo wrote:The first thing that comes in my mind is trying to install Daemon Tools in the guest Windows machine, so you can mount CD/DVD images you can pick from shared folders. But this won't enable you to do disc-to-disc copy, will just increase number of virtual drives in the guest.

Thanks for your reply, but this really isn't much in help my situation. I am not sure how having more virtual drives would be any use. if I set up an ISO image as the CD/DVD, it still blocks any further CD/DVD drives, so I'm still in the same position that I was in to start with.

I understand that there might be some limitations if this program is implementing drives as ATA. That would mean that there are limits to how many there are. But still, even if there's one virtual hard drive (can't have two of those either it seems...) that still means that with 2 ATA channels, there's 4 ATA device addresses available, one for master and one for slave for both channels. The current limitation of one hard drive and one CD/DVD seems to be a not-so-good way of having this so that it's only working on a single device per ATA channel. Or, have I got this completely wrong?