Win 8.1 no CD/DVD Recognition

[rudiau]

Host: iMac (late 2009) Mavericks 10.9.2
Guest: Win 8.1
Virtual Box: 4.3.8: Extensions installed. Guest Additions: VBoxWindowsAdditions and VBoxWindowsAdditions-AMD64 installed.
Settings: Devices/Storage/Controller IDE ---> Host Drive "OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5680H"
CD/DVD Drive: Secondary Master - Passthrough enabled.

Installation of VirtualBox went smoothly as did the installation of Win 8.1, but for the life of me I cannot get the guest to read or recognize a CD or DVD.
The CD's and DVD's, and I have tried many, all work fine in Mavericks.
Had also trialled Parallels without a problem.
Am I missing a setting somewhere?
Thanks.

[mpack]

If you're talking about an external (USB) CD drive, then for some reason those don't seem to be recognized as a CD drive by VirtualBox on Mac hosts. The workaround is to image the CD media, creating an ISO or DMG, and mount the image in the VM instead.

[rudiau]

Hi mpack,

No, It is an internal CD/DVD drive.
Is there any sequence to the installation of the extra software and also the host Mac has an Intel processor, so was the installation of VBoxWindowsAdditions-AMD64 necessary?

[rudiau]

Noticed a few anomalies.
In Guest Win8.1, Navigate to Device Manager: DVD/CD-ROM drives ---> VBOX CD-ROM ATA Device, then right click and click on properties, locks up Device Manager.
' Navigate to Computer Management ---> Disk Management, results in a blank screen where the drives would normally be listed. At the bottom of that window is the message:
' "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service ......."
' In Explorer both CD icons listed in the left and right panes, have two tiny question marks embedded into them.

[rudiau]

Sorry, starting to sound like a running commentary here.

Unchecking ie disabling passthrough allows me to see the properties of DVD/CD ROM Devices in Device Manager and the list of drives in Management ---> Disk Management.
However, in Explorer I still have the two embedded question marks PLUS now when I click on the CD Drive the drive spins up AND i get an error message:

Header: LOCATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.
Label Message: "D:/ Is not available.
The Disk structure is corrupted and unreadable."
Button: OK button

The disk is a data disk and reads in Mavericks and other Win laptops.

[rudiau]

Spent most of the weekend on this, while not entirely wasted, I've learnt a lot.
It appears the message "D:/ Is not available.
The Disk structure is corrupted and unreadable."
Maybe correct.
After reading numerous posts, I read this for the third time.(also concluded my comprehension skills ain't what they used to be)
Users Manual Ch 5.9
The standard CD/DVD emulation allows for reading standard data CD and DVD formats only.
As an experimental feature, for additional capabilities, it is possible to give the guest direct access
to the CD/DVD host drive by enabling “passthrough” mode. Depending on the host hardware,
this may enable three things to work, potentially:
• CD/DVD writing from within the guest, if the host DVD drive is a CD/DVD writer;
• playing audio CDs;
• playing encrypted DVDs.

So passthough experimental only.

Put in the Win 8.1 Installation Disk and presto all good.

Summation
Not all data disks are formatted the same. The one I was using was a copy.
Passthrough Crashes Windows Explorer. (So my present config is Controller IDE PIIX3, Host Drive "OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5680H" No passthrough.)
Have to re-evaluate whether this is going to suit my situation. Mounting ISO's or not? (actually reminds me of the probs we used have with Win98 and CD-Roms)
Thanks all.

PS. Sound like an ungrateful Pr*ck.
VirtualBox is great and appreciated, I love it.

[mpack]

(also concluded my comprehension skills ain't what they used to be)

That's hard to confirm, because I'm not entirely sure what those skills have led you to conclude.

VirtualBox is a multiplatform application. That's actually quite hard to do well if it involves using hardware on those different platforms. As far as I know, host CD drive access works fine on Windows and Linux hosts, it's only Mac's that seem to have problems. But, I don't own a Mac host so I can't help pin down the details.

The passthrough feature shouldn't have been involved in your case, so whether it was experimental or not shouldn't have mattered. VirtualBox has always had a CD/DVD-ROM feature which could be mapped to virtual (.ISO) or physical media (CD in host drive). You don't need passthrough for any of that. What passthrough does is allow the features of the host drive to be visible to the guest. Mainly this allowed the guest to use the hosts CD/DVD burner feature if it had one (since without passthrough the emulation was always of a CD-ROM - i.e. no burning). I think it may also incidentally have allowed CD-audios to be played, but few people need that these days.

So, the section you quoted from the manual is correct, but I don't see how it applies (much) to the problem you described. Your first post seemed to imply that you had tested the VBox feature with several disks, and also with other VM software - and hence proved that the problem was not with the disk.