virtualbox.org

I've installed and used VirtualBox fine for a time. After rebooting Windows I can no longer see my primary slave harddisk. I remember the same happening after rebooting after installing VMWare.

I have two harddisks as primary master and primary slave and two CD-ROM drives, one is secondary master and one Daemon Tools. Only the primary slave is missing.

My guest is Ubuntu 8.04 to which I tried to install Guest Additions before giving up and going with SSH.

How do I get the drive back, short of uninstalling VirtualBox?

Update: I have uninstalled 1.6.4, cleaned up the drivers it left behind (that was a scare) and installed 2.0.2. I still experience the same issue, but I think I've found a way to mitigate it:

Before rebooting, I close VirtualBox, then go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\ and rename all VBoxTAP.sys -files to VBoxTAP.sys.bak. After reboot, I rename them back to the original and start VirtualBox. This seems to work fine.

Is this a bug or something undocumented?

What is your host OS? XP or Vista. I assume XP for now. So you are saying that if you have VirtualBox loaded then go into Administration Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management then Disk 1 is missing, but if you rename VBoxTAP.sys then it isn't? Bizarre!

Yes, my host is XP SP 2. And yes, Disk 1 with its two partitions is nowhere to be found in Disk Management or Device Manager.

Does anyone have two harddrives on primary IDE and have everything working?

Does you BIOS see the hard drives? I suspect a hardware failure, either the drive, IDE controller or IDE cable. As I have a primary hard drive on SATA and two on IDE (with two CD/DVD drives on IDE too) I never had an issue with them. I did have a problem once where I lost a drive but that was the cause of a faulty IDE cable, and way before I started using VB.