no cd/dvd drives in virtualbox

**rbprogrammer** · January 2nd, 2008

well there is my problem, virtualbox will not recognize my two cd/dvd drives

..

they are /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd respectively. before when i needed to use a disc, i had to create an image of the disc, save it to a local directory ( in a shared guest directory if i needed it after i installed windows ), then in virtualbox, use that image as the drive. but as you can see in the screenshot, i only have /dev/sdc1. don't know what partition on which drive that is.

i also saw somewhere ( regretfully i cant find where now ) to use this command:

Code:

export VBOX_CDROM='/dev/hdc:/dev/hdd'

but that did not work either, even after i rebooted. i even tried multiple times..

as far as fstab is concerned, this is what i have:

Code:

...
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0  udf,iso9660  user,noauto,exec        0  0  
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom1  udf,iso9660  user,noauto,exec        0  0

how do i get at least one of the drives ( if not both ) recognized by virtualbox??

**rbprogrammer** · January 2nd, 2008

forgot the attachment

..

**malibusurfer2** · January 3rd, 2008

I have a similar problem. I can't get VirtualBox CD/DVD-ROM to show a drive in the drop down box for a Windows XP virtual machine. I can click on Mount CD/DVD Drive and Host CD/DVD Drive, but the box is empty - no /dev/whatever. The Mount point under my CD drive Porperties, Volume is /media/cdrom0. Is there a line I need to add to my XP.xml file under .VirtualBox/Machines/XP?

**rbprogrammer** · January 15th, 2008

bump

**spur** · January 15th, 2008

Have you tried ensuring they are mounted in Ubuntu first? I have found that i need to do that to see them.(I'm not sure if that is normal or not)

**rbprogrammer** · January 15th, 2008

what are the odds of that... with a few weeks of not getting this solved, i bump my thread, then just mere minutes i find this: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/775

apparently, it is a problem in VirtualBox v1.5.2 and how it accesses the device ids. there are two fixes for it, one is a little sloppy & jerry-rigged. the other is a bit more elegant. i only tried the better solution at the bottom which was just to install libhal-dev.....

hope that helps you too malibusurfer2.