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Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 13:36
by mpack
loukingjr wrote:Okay, I'm confused. For one thing I just remembered my Linux laptop has a built in CD/DVD drive.
I guess you can tell I don't use it much.
A native host CD drive is no problem. The problem I've seen with OS X hosts is, I believe (since I'm not an OS X user) that in fact they are nearly always using a CD/DVD drive in a USB caddy, not a native CD drive at all. Such a drive looks to apps like USB mass storage, not like a native CD. Hence when VirtualBox displays a list of host drives filtered to show only optical drives... said drive doesn't show up.
loukingjr wrote:WinLite along with MicroXP were pared down versions of XP. Usually showed up on torrent sites.
Yes, but nLite itself is a legitimate slipstreaming tool. Use of it doesn't by itself prove that anything immoral is going on, but it does mean that for practical reasons alone, we can't support the user.
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 13:43
by loukingjr
I see, well I no longer have any Macs with built in optical drives. But, I do have an external USB Superdrive (Apple's) and it does show up in the USB menu and works from there. Of course it's not selected in the storage settings for a guest.
FWIW, The only reason I even mentioned WinLite was because there is a CD on the OP's desktop named "WinLite".
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 18:28
by Mac1965
mpack wrote:nLite is a slipstreaming tool, I'm not at all sure what WinLite is.
Also, it is not illegal to give away XP licenses, provided the originator doesn't continue using it as well.
However, there are other reasons why we can't support anything except regular XP setup CDs here. Quite apart from the legal issues, there is the quite practical matter that we have no idea what's on the disk.
That said, AFAIK it's a well known problem that a USB optical drive on the host is not seen as a optical drive by VirtualBox, and hence can't be selected from the dialog. This is probably a limitation of USB, i.e. that it looks like generic mass storage. You are effectively restricted to using ISO images, which you can still make using the CD drive.
Thank you for the post. Can you tell me how to make an ISO image using the CD drive.
Ric
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 18:33
by loukingjr
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 18:58
by mpack
Wow... that's a lot of text to tell someone how to rename "*.cdr" to "*.iso"!
The ISO 9660 standard (with later improvements) describes the filesystem used on data CDs. If you make a raw image of a CD then it is what people refer to as an ISO. ISO image files on Windows and Linux PCs are typically given the ".iso" extension. The ".cdr" extension may also be used, especially on Macs. To my knowledge ".iso" and ".cdr" are just two conventional extensions for the exact same kind of file.
VirtualBox also accepts .dmg images for mounting as virtual CDs. I believe DMGs are compressed and have a header, so these are not identical to an ISO.
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 9. Sep 2015, 22:13
by loukingjr
mpack wrote:Wow... that's a lot of text to tell someone how to rename "*.cdr" to "*.iso"!
Yes it is. I chose that link because it was verbose and hard to screw up. There are actually two different methods to directly convert a CD/DVD to an .iso in the Terminal but I didn't include them because a. Some people are adverse to using the Terminal and b. They almost always get the syntax wrong.
As far as just changing the .cdr extension to .iso. I seem to remember the resulting .iso file will only work on Macs. I could be remembering that incorrectly however.
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 11. Sep 2015, 20:02
by Mac1965
I went to the site you mentioned and during the process of converting my CD into an ISO image the process stopped because it could not find "driver.cab". Being that I cannot connect Win XP to the internet via virtual box I do not know how to add the file to the CD.
Frustrated!
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 11. Sep 2015, 22:45
by mpack
Imaging a CD does not involve reading any files - so I don't know what you were doing, but it wasn't imaging a CD.
Re: Optical drive not recognized.
Posted: 11. Sep 2015, 22:59
by loukingjr
Don is certainly correct. Imaging a disk makes a bit by bit copy and doesn't care what is on the CD/DVD. It could be Software, Music, a Movie etc. At what point did you get the message?