virtualbox.org

Some basics:
Mid-2012 15" MBP
Host OS: OSX 10.8.5
VirtualBox 4.3.2
Guest OS: Windows 8.1 (though I've seen it on my Win7 instance too, but we'll stick with 8.1 for this.)
CD/DVD Passthrough: Enabled

When I boot up the guest, it sees the drive as a CD-ROM, not at a DVD drive. Further, if I attempt to access it, it crashes the guest OS. First the wheel spins to show working. After a while of that, the explorer.exe shell resets. I can open file explorer in windows then but the CD-ROM drive is gone.
Once it crashes, I can't get anything back and have to re-boot the guest.
The current driver in the guest is the VBOX CD-ROM.

Anyone have any ideas on how to start trouble shooting? Not really sure where to start!
Thanks in advance.

First, you need to understand that a virtual machine uses virtual hardware - in this case a virtual CD drive. The virtual CD drive might be implemented by accessing the host drive or an ISO image. In neither case is it the intention that the hardware visible to the guest will match the actual hardware of the host, i.e. it isn't relevant that the host labels its own drive as a DVD drive.

That said, VBox shouldn't crash (though actually it sounds like it was Windows Explorer that crashed, not VBox). What kind of disk did you have in the host drive at the time? Is that disk known to be good? (I assume you did have the VM associated with a host drive?).

Also, post a VM log file. For details read Minimum information needed for assistance.

Thanks mpack,

Understood on the virtual aspect of it and you're correct that I'd say that it's explorer, or the guest instance, that is seizing up. By associating with the host drive, yes. It's selected as a device and it shows in explorer as D: drive. (I think that's what you meant)
I've validated that it's a good disk, a few of them, DVDs. I've also attached an external USB Amazon Basics DVD-RW drive and am accessing it perfectly from within the guest OS.

Just to reitterate the basics, with a few addition details, per your link.
VBox 4.3.2 r90405
Extensions Installed
Host: OSX 10.8.5 (64bit). 6GB of machine available 8GB
Guest: Win 8.1 (64bit). 2GB of machine available 8GB

I've been playing some more and there are two cases.

Case 1: Passthrough enabled.
As described above. The attached log file shows this sequence:
DVD in the Mac
Power up Guest OS.
Once up, "CD Drive (D:)" listed in File Explorer, but no contents represented.
Double click CD Drive. Spinner initiates and then I wait.
After a few minutes, I just closed File Explorer and attempted to shut down the guest through the OS.
After a few more minutes of Guest reporting "Shutting down" I gave up and forced it down.

Case 2: Without passthrough enabled
The drive shows and I can browse files on a DVD, however the drive lists as a CD-ROM drive, not DVD.
An application such as VLAN won't play a DVD from it. Not entirely certain that this is related to VBox but I remember seeing this before on another mac. Then, I enabled passthrough and that resolved it.

Logs for both are attached.

Thanks!

Hey mpack,

Just curious if you'd seen this or if I'm dead in the water?

The log has many reps of this, just before being shut down.

Passthrough.log wrote: 00:03:22.943491 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: RESET, DevSel=0 AIOIf=0 CmdIf0=0xa0 (4996766 usec ago) CmdIf1=0x00 (-1 usec ago)
00:03:22.943564 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: finished processing RESET
00:03:22.945596 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: performing device RESET
00:03:27.943709 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: RESET, DevSel=0 AIOIf=0 CmdIf0=0xa0 (3999462 usec ago) CmdIf1=0x00 (-1 usec ago)
00:03:27.943790 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: finished processing RESET
00:03:27.945813 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: performing device RESET
00:03:32.943234 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: RESET, DevSel=0 AIOIf=0 CmdIf0=0xa0 (3999275 usec ago) CmdIf1=0x00 (-1 usec ago)
00:03:32.943290 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: finished processing RESET
00:03:32.945318 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: performing device RESET
00:03:37.943744 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: RESET, DevSel=0 AIOIf=0 CmdIf0=0xa0 (3999460 usec ago) CmdIf1=0x00 (-1 usec ago)
00:03:37.943815 PIIX3 ATA: Ctl#0: finished processing RESET
00:03:37.945843 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: performing device RESET

I assume this is a consequence of having a copy protected DVD-Video in the driver, rather than the intended data DVD. I would guess the only way to watch this video is to rip it to a shared folder. I don't know why this would crash the guest OS shell, I would have thought it would just give a disk error.

I ignored the "without passthough looks like CD" log, since I already addressed that in my previous post.