Install on MacBook Air - DVD Drive Not Recognised

[levelbest]

Odd problem.

Just picked up my MacBook Air today and went to install VMWare Fusion.  Plugged in an optical dvd/cd drive and it's recognized by OSX - the disc shows up on the desktop and I can browse it just fine.

I fire up Fusion and it doesn't see the drive - no continue button unless I continue without the DVD drive.  The second screen doesn't see the CD/DVD either.

What am I doing wrong?  Seems if OSX saw the drive, that Fusion Would.  This is a burned iso to DVD from MSDN of Windows 7 x64.

Been going round for an hour trying to figure this out.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Was told I should run vmware rather than bothering with bootcamp or parallels.

Thanks!
JOHN

[Mikero · Accepted solution]

Hm, testing this out, I was expecting it to work, but in my results I've not been able to have it reognized on my MacBook Air.

I tested then on one of our testing machines (which is a bit out of date, running 10.6.5 and missing the EFI 2.0 Firmware update) and it worked.

We upgraded that testing machine to 10.6.6, and it no longer works.

So, it looks like Apple changed something and that broke our EasyInstall detection of the physical DVD drive.

As such, you can create a disk image using Disk Utility and install using that for now until we work with Apple to figure out who's bug this is.

Here's our KB for how to do that:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1015406

Thanks for mentioning it!

[levelbest]

Nice - do I get a free copy for finding a bug?  Kidding....

Anyway, once I did an iso install of win 7, I found that plugging the drive in got it recognized by win 7 once the image was working.  So the only problem is trying to get the disc installed.  Luckily I had access to my msdn account and just grabbed the image which made for an easy install.

Very impressed with how things are running so far - so most likely will take advantage of the special you have going on and will buy the product.

Thanks for the confirmation and quick reply!  Glad I didn't go buy another dvd drive.