DVD-image not available if attached via command line

[Jari Turkia]

(This may be related to ticket:5681)

On my guest OS setup I do not have any DVD-images mounted. After starting the VM and using VBoxManage controlvm dvdattach to attach the drive, does not make the image available. On 3.0.x that did work.

I checked this from GUI and using dvdattach from CLI does not make the CD/DVD activity "led" on the bottom of the screen enabled. Mounting the image from GUI enables the "led" and makes the image available for the guest OS.

[Jari Turkia]

Corretion: It seems that DVD-media cannot be controlled form command-line at all.

The defect is present in not-yet-released 3.1.2 also.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Which exact command and options did you try?

[Jari Turkia]

For example:

VBoxManage controlvm "<VM name here>" dvdattach none

does not release the DVD-image, nor:

VBoxManage controlvm "<VM name here>" dvdattach /path/to/an/iso/image.iso

does not change currently inserted media.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

These command line parameters are now obsolete. See ​http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#vboxmanage-storage

You should have received an error though. Will fix that.

[Frank Mehnert]

To be more verbose:

Note that the syntax of attaching/detaching a medium to/from a VM has changed. As now we support more than one CD/DVD device, one must specify the exact controller / port / device, see the user manual section 8.15.2. The old commands dvdattach/dvddetach are still there but apparently are broken now (though they don't appear in the help anymore). Do the following:

1. Excecute VBoxManage showvminfo VM_NAME
   This will show you the name of your storage controller, for instance

   ...
   IDE Controller (0, 0): ...
   IDE Controller (1, 0): ...
   

2. In the example above, the second device is the CDROM device (secondary master). Use

   VBoxManage storageattach VM_NAME \
     --storagectl "IDE Controller" \
     --port 1 \
     --device 0 \
     --medium IMAGE.iso
   

   This will mount the file IMAGE.iso to the secondary master.