virtualbox.org

I have been using Virtual Box on my Win 8.1 for a Win XP environment for over a year to play old legacy games that no longer run on Win 8.1. It has been great for that purpose.

My system is a Win8.1 with a combo CD/DVD drive, and that has been working fabulously with Virtual Box running Win XP.

Yesterday I installed a new additional combo CD/DVD/BD drive (only 1 SATA power cable and data cable, so I disconnected my existing CD/DVD drive). I was wanting the flexibility to watch Blu-Ray movies.

That didn't work out, as I found out Win 8.1 doesn't support Blue-Ray playback, so I uninstalled and removed the new drive and reconnected the old faithful CD/DVD drive.

However, now when I try to use Win XP in Vbox to play my old CDROM game disc, XP sees the CD drive but does not recognize that there is a CD in the drive, whether a game CDROM or an audio CD.

The CD drive is seen by the host Win8.1 and it plays all CD content, but the Win XP, while it sees the old CD drive, it just doesn't know there is a CD of any kind in the drive.

Obviously, the change happened after I installed the newer drive, but I would have thought things would go back to normal once I reinstalled the old CD drive.

Any ideas on what can fix this so CD drive under XP will be recognized as having had a CD inserted?

Oh, I did a System Restore on the XP, and also did a install-repair on Virtual Box, and when nothing changed, I then did an Vbox uninstall and reinstall on it. Still have the same problem.

Thanks for any help you can give. This has me stumped.

VM log file please. After a problem session is completed, right click the VM in the GUI. Select "Show Log". Save "VBox.log" to a file. Compress that file and attach it to a message here. Make sure the VM is fully shut down before taking a log.

Here's the compressed log (Zip format). Thank you.

The provided log is incomplete, because the VM was still running: I did ask you to make sure the VM was shut down before grabbing the log.

Continuing anyway, I'm not seeing any evidence that a host CD drive has been mounted in the virtual drive of the guest. Obviously, putting a CD in the host drive is no good if the VM doesn't know to look there. Perhaps you could zip up a copy of your VM's ".vbox" file, so we can verify that step.

Mpack, sorry that I've been rather dense in following your requests. Alright, I made sure I closed the program entirely. Here is the vbox.log in ZIP format.

You also said, "Perhaps you could zip up a copy of your VM's ".vbox" file, so we can verify that step."

That is attached also (ZIP format).

I appreciate your being patient with me, and I thank you for your willingness to help.

As I thought, you have not mounted the host drive in the VM. The VM is a separate PC, it will not automatically take note of CDs you insert in a host drive unless you tell it to, which you do using the "Storage" section of the VM settings. The picture below may make things clearer. You can also change media while the VM is running, using the "Device" menu at the top of the VM window.

When a host drive is selected an addition "Passthrough" option will appear. Checking this option may be necessary to play some games, especially if the CD is copy protected.

This reply is over late, and I apologize for that. Your solution worked, by the way. Thank you, belatedly.

No problem, thanks for the (late) feedback.