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11 Troubleshooting
11.5.3 Linux host CD/DVD drive not found (older distributions)
On older Linux distributions, if your CD/DVD device has a different name, VirtualBox
may be unable to find it. On older Linux hosts, VirtualBox performs the following steps
to locate your CD/DVD drives:
1. VirtualBox examines if the environment variable VBOX_CDROM is defined (see
below). If so, VirtualBox omits all the following checks.
2. VirtualBox tests if /dev/cdrom works.
3. In addition, VirtualBox checks if any CD/DVD drives are currently mounted by
checking /etc/mtab.
4. In addition, VirtualBox checks if any of the entries in /etc/fstab point to
CD/DVD devices.
In other words, you can try to set VBOX_CDROM to contain a list of your CD/DVD
devices, separated by colons, for example as follows:
export VBOX_CDROM=’/dev/cdrom0:/dev/cdrom1’
On modern Linux distributions, VirtualBox uses the hardware abstraction layer (hal)
to locate CD and DVD hardware.
11.5.4 Linux host floppy not found
The previous instructions (for CD and DVD drives) apply accordingly to floppy disks,
except that on older distributions VirtualBox tests for /dev/fd
*
devices by default,
and this can be overridden with the VBOX_FLOPPY environment variable.
11.5.5 Strange guest IDE error messages when writing to CD/DVD
If the experimental CD/DVD writer support is enabled with an incorrect VirtualBox,
host or guest configuration, it is possible that any attempt to access the CD/DVD writer
fails and simply results in guest kernel error messages (for Linux guests) or applica-
tion error messages (for Windows guests). VirtualBox performs the usual consistency
checks when a VM is powered up (in particular it aborts with an error message if the
device for the CD/DVD writer is not writable by the user starting the VM), but it can-
not detect all misconfigurations. The necessary host and guest OS configuration is not
specific for VirtualBox, but a few frequent problems are listed here which occurred in
connection with VirtualBox.
Special care must be taken to use the correct device. The configured host CD/DVD
device file name (in most cases /dev/cdrom) must point to the device that allows
writing to the CD/DVD unit. For CD/DVD writer units connected to a SCSI controller
or to a IDE controller that interfaces to the Linux SCSI subsystem (common for some
SATA controllers), this must refer to the SCSI device node (e.g. /dev/scd0). Even
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