Optical Drive gets hijacked by Fusion...??

[Sidhartha]

Hi,

I have a Mac Pro. Octo core.

I'm running Fusion and generally loving it. However, when I'm running Fusion it seems to hijack my optical drive. If i put a software CD in the optical drive it doesn't even get recognised under Mac OSX... can't see it on the desktop or in Finder... also the eject key on my keyboard doesn't eject the CD - despite the eject symbol appearing on-screen in Mac OSX when I press the key. All this happens when I am running an active session of Windows XP Pro under Fusion.

IF i then shutdown Windows... but not Fusion, my optical drive is handed back to Mac OSX and the CD appears on the desktop as normal.

Anyone got an idea what's going on here and how I can fix it...??

Thanks

[bgertzfield]

You probably have your drive connected to Fusion. When your drive is connected to Fusion, Mac OS can't use it, and vice-versa.

You can disconnect it by clicking the CD/DVD icon in the bottom of the Fusion VM window and choosing "Disconnect CD/DVD".

[Sidhartha]

Ahhh... so it doesn't switch control between whichever operating system happens to be 'in focus' as it were at that time... (i.e. where the cursor is live)... you physically have to switch control...?

[admin]

By which I'm sure Ben meant "You probably have your optical[/i] drive..."

[admin]

Ahhh... so it doesn't switch control between

whichever operating system happens to be 'in focus'

as it were at that time... (i.e. where the cursor is

live)... you physically have to switch control...?

Right, what if the guest was doing something? You wouldn't want to yank the drive out from under it.

[Sidhartha]

True. Thanks guys.

[ardias]

So what is the correct setting? disconnected? If disconnected can the optical drive still be accessible by the Windows VM?

[admin]

The correct setting depends on what you want to do. If the optical drive is disconnected, the virtual machine cannot access it.

[ardias]

Why is it one or the other, but not both? Why can't the optical drive be accessed at the same time by OS X and the VM, like the HD?

[admin]

: Virtual Hardware. The hard disk is not being simultaneously accessed by the host and the guest, the host is in control. Fusion translates read/write operations on the virtual disk to read/write operations on a file on the hard disk. For Boot Camp virtual machines, the Boot Camp partition needs to be unmounted to give control to the guest. If you need to access a CD in both environments simultaneously, you could set up a network share or shared folder. Even in this case, though, only one OS is in control - the other is making requests.