Guest stops DVD drive from reading discs

[Win10hostWin7VM]

If I try to read a CD or DVD when the guest system is running, the disc spins but is then ejected, and I get a pop-up saying "insert a disk into the D: drive". If I close the guest the drive works OK, whether or not Virtual Box is running.

The Vbox settings show the host D: drive attached to SATA Port 1. I've tried all combinations of the Passthrough and Hot-pluggable check boxes, but they don't appear to make any difference.

My system is:
host: Windows 10 HOme (64 bity)
guest: Windows 7 32-bit
running on a Lenovo AIO.

I've tried to find something about this in the Troubleshooting section of the manual, but without success.

David

[mpack]

Are you saying that when a host CD/DVD drive is assigned to the guest then you can no longer use it from the host? If so, I'd have to say - well, naturally. You need to disconnect the drive from the VM if you no longer want the VM to own it.

You may find it easier to always use an ISO image of the media you want to access, rather than a physical host drive. That way these conflicts over physical access never occur.

[Win10hostWin7VM]

When the guest is running, neither the host nor the guest can read optical discs. When it's shut down, the host can read discs OK.

So far I've been able to work around this by:
(with the guest shut down) copy the contents of the disc to a shared folder;
start up the guest, and copy the disc files in the shared folder to a local folder in it - necessary because if I try to run the disc's setup program (or equivalent) from the shared folder it doesn't find the files it's looking for;
run setup from the local folder.

It's a bit cumbersome, and fails for one app which requires the disc to be present when it runs - but that's one I can live without.

I raised the query because when I first set up the virtual machine it was able to read optical discs OK - I loaded Windows 7 onto it from a disc. I assume I have inadvertently changed a VBox setting, but I don't know which one.

[socratis]

neither the host nor the guest can read optical discs

*ANY* optical disks? If not, what disk are we talking about?

It's a bit cumbersome

You can try mpack's suggestion; create an ISO from the disk, then mount the ISO instead of the disk.

[Win10hostWin7VM]

It applies to all discs that I've tried.

I was hoping that there might be a simple fix, so that the guesst could read from the DVD drive; but it appears not; so I'll follow the suggestion of creating an iso file.

Thanks for the advice!