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In VirtualBox 5 my Vista Virtual Machine has no problem finding the optical disks. But in Ubuntu 15.10 or Ubuntu Mint 23 no OD can be mounted (as far as my ability takes me which is beginner). A "Disk" utility observes that the optical drives are there but I cannot use them. Ideas please?

What "optical disks" isn't it finding? Are referring to ISO files mounted in the VM, or host drive(s) (plural?).

Best guess: you are putting media in the physical drive and expecting that a virtual machine will see it there. VMs don't do physical media unless you tell it to.

If you need to continue this discussion then post a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

I see no log file when right clicking the icon in Windows. Is this what you meant me to do?

OK got it and added LOg attached here.

I had a number of questions too.

Your zip is 22 bytes, and empty.

Stand by

Attempting to zip and attach file. Perhaps I have it now...

I see no optical disks mounted in the VM. The only media mounted in the VM is the file "{a12f0b18-4572-4779-895d-fd5f736b8dec}.vhd" (presumably meaning this VM is a linked clone, though that isn't important in this discussion).

To mount optical media the VM recipe needs to include a virtual CD/DVD drive. Then, while the CD drive is selected, you can use the right hand side of the Storage panel to choose the ISO or host drive you want to associate with the virtual drive. Alternatively you can access the Device menu while the VM is running.

As an irrelevant aside: you have assigned 4 vCPUs to the VM. That is 100% of the cores available to your host. Not a good idea. I would change this to 2 vCPUs.

Thank you. I have tried to mount drives through the Device menu but I get a message that an existing drive cannot be unmounted. I occasionally get a menu that suggests I mount a virtual drive and offers a explorer window but I have no idea what is wanted here. ??

I need precise error messages, or a screenshot would be even better.