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I see that both VMs have the host DVD drive mounted. What happens if you dismount it from one or both? (set the virtual CD/DVD drive to empty).

mpack wrote:I see that both VMs have the host DVD drive mounted. What happens if you dismount it from one or both? (set the virtual CD/DVD drive to empty).

interesting. what happened was I can start a second guest if I remove the host dvd drive from one of them. what I also see that is interesting is that even though I deleted a gparted .iso from the media manager it still shows up in the drop down menu when a VM is open.

loukingjr wrote:what I also see that is interesting is that even though I deleted a gparted .iso from the media manager it still shows up in the drop down menu when a VM is open.

That's ok, that's just the VBox host software showing you its "recently used" list - it's just a list of strings and doesn't mean that the files have been mounted in any VM.

Next experiment: you can mount the host DVD drive in both VMs, but try disabling "Passthrough" in both (obviously I'm thinking that close control of a drive may require exclusive access to be assigned to a VM).

mpack wrote:

loukingjr wrote:what I also see that is interesting is that even though I deleted a gparted .iso from the media manager it still shows up in the drop down menu when a VM is open.

That's ok, that's just the VBox host software showing you its "recently used" list - it's just a list of strings and doesn't mean that the files have been mounted in any VM.

Next experiment: you can mount the host DVD drive in both VMs, but try disabling "Passthrough" in both.

okie doke. I thought one had to use passthrough with the Mac version but I'll give it a try.
back in a few

loukingjr wrote:I thought one had to use passthrough with the Mac version but I'll give it a try.

AFAIK, passthrough is only needed if you want to burn a CD/DVD - applies to all hosts. However I'm not a Mac user so will not swear that it doesn't have special requirements.

mpack wrote:

loukingjr wrote:I thought one had to use passthrough with the Mac version but I'll give it a try.

AFAIK, passthrough is only needed if you want to burn a CD/DVD - applies to all hosts. However I'm not a Mac user so will not swear that it doesn't have special requirements.

well, it seems only one guest can have cd/dvd access at a time. I tried what you suggested, selected host drive on both but disabling passthrough but the second vm wouldn't launch.

edit: I don't remember having to have all but one guest's cd/dvd drive set to empty in the past. could this be another Mountain Lion problem?

ahem... So, does my problem mean one can't open more than one guest at a time if they all have the IDE drive set to Host CD/DVD as a secondary master with passthrough enabled or not? Or is this Mac VB 4.2.1 or OSX 10.8.2 specific? At this point I don't know if it's a bug, a regression or what.

? I thought you had already determined "not" by your own experiments. What other verification do you need?

mpack wrote:? I thought you had already determined "not" by your own experiments. What other verification do you need?

well, just because it's not working on mine doesn't mean it doesn't work for everyone else.