Guest OS not recognizing CD drive

[meterman70]

Host: Mac mini (Late 2012), 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, running latest version of Fusion (11.); Guest: Windows 7 Professional

I recently decided to build a new Win7 VM, after the one I built sometime ago fell so far behind on updates it just sat there like a bump on a log, hogging resources and slowing down my Mac.

The new VM is finally up to date enough it no longer needs to phone in, has been cleaned up, optimized etc., and is now ready for me to install the few apps for which I still require Windows.

However, when I plugged in my Apple SuperDrive, VMWare complained I need Boot Camp drivers so I can access the SuperDrive??

What did I do wrong and how can I get the guest OS to recognize the drive?

[wila]

Hi,

You didn't do anything wrong. The apple superdrive is not recognized as it has no windows inbox driver.

In order to use that superdrive from within windows you have to acquire the apple bootcamp drivers for it.

Once you have those installed it will work.

See also:

Install Windows 7 on your Mac using Boot Camp - Apple Support

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[meterman70 · Accepted solution]

Thank you - your answer put me on the eventual trail to the solution, and here's what I did.

Because I had everything else working just fine in my standalone VM, I had no need nor desire to create a Boot Camp partition per the article.

I did download the Boot Camp Assistant from this page on Apple's site : https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1720

Once the HUGE installer was downloaded, I copied it over to the VM, and drilling down this path:

Boot Camp 5.1.5621/BootCamp/Drivers/Apple/ I then extracted the file AppleODDInstaller64.exe to the desktop.

After running that file and seeing it through, I plugged in the Super Drive, and Windows did its little "Installing Drivers..." dance.

I then grabbed a Windows app CD and tried it - works just fine!

I now have one final issue to address with this VM (in a new thread later).