virtualbox.org

I have had at least 1 Ubuntu guest on my computer for almost a year now, but none have ever done this. All of a sudden, Windows Explorer popped up in a window with a new drive, E:, as if I had just put in a new disc. As you can probably tell from the title, the "CD" is called "Install Ubuntu". Only thing is, I only have 1 CD drive, and it is filled up with a movie! I don't have any VM's open right now, either, and I closed the last one at least 2 hours ago, so why is it showing up now?

What's going on? I never opened any Ubuntu ISO's I've downloaded, except explicitly in the VM. Furthermore, I have never downloaded any "Install Ubuntu" ISO's, and even if I did, wouldn't they take up the whole computer or open up in ISODownloader or whatever Windows 8 calls it, instead of showing up as a new drive letter in Windows Explorer? For the record, I am not going to touch that drive with a 10-foot pole, so I may never find out what happens if I actually open it up, but I'm still confused.

I have 2 Ubuntu 13.10's on my system. One was upgraded from Ubuntu 13.04 (I will call this ubuntu_old), and didn't go well. Pretty much all the VBox programs got uninstalled, including Guest Additions, but that is another issue. The other was installed fresh just today (I will call this ubuntu_new).

Host:
OS: Windows 8.1
Hard Drive: 500GB (260GB used, 195GB free)
RAM: 6GB
64-bit

Guest:
OS: see question
Hard Drive: ubuntu_old: 50GB, ubuntu_new: 40GB
RAM: both 2GB right now
both 64-bit
both had guest additions at one point, but ubuntu_old uninstalled them during the upgrade

And why did you conclude that this had anything at all to do with VirtualBox? VBox doesn't implement any virtual drives on the host.

It sounds like you installed one of those Ubuntu test drive thingies whose name I forget.

What test drive thingies? I'm not sure if it's VirtualBox, but since I can't remember doing anything else that would have made it appear, not to mention that I don't have 2 CD-ROM drives (or DVD-ROM, etc.), I figured it MIGHT be VirtualBox confusing virtual drives with real ones or something. I will ask on Ubuntu forums as well.

I would like to see the guests log file ( as an attachment ) and perhaps a screen shot of what it is you are seeing.

This is all going on in the host computer, nothing is going on in any guests. As I said before, when this first showed up, no guests had been on for HOURS. Here are all the guest logs for all guests I have ever used that are still on the computer just in case, though.

Sorry for the bad photo quality, I did it in Paint & thought I should shrink it since you had to scroll down to see the whole drive icon. Unfortunately, Paint doesn't scale well, I think because it's bitmap-based not vector.

Interesting.

I suspect what you are really seeing has to do with the way Windows handles media these days, but I don't do that much in Windows any more. I do know that it is not actually VirtualBox doing this as I know of no way it could, and I do know some about the code. It may be because you still have the install media mounted in the guests virtual CD/DVD. I think the best place to ask if it is still bothering you is a Windows forum.

Weird. So what you are saying is that for some reason one of the ISO's is still mounted even though the VM was turned off, and this bled through to the host? Interesting, I wonder why this never happened before? Maybe it is a new bug or quirk in Ubuntu 13.10? Well, whatever, it's an install ISO, so as long as
i never click on it I think I should be fine. Thank you for attempting to puzzle it out with me.

We're saying that you have this ISO mounted as a virtual CD using some host driver or tool, and the issue has nothing to do with VirtualBox - which provides no such feature, buggy or otherwise.

Huh, weird, I've never done anything I can imagine would have resulted in that. Anyway, thanks for the help.