Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 user manual 5 CD/DVD-ROM and floppy settings

3 Starting out with VirtualBox

lifetime. You may, however, freely remove, add and exchange virtual hard drives after the machine has been set up. For example, if you wish to copy some files from another virtual disk that you created, you can connect that disk as a second hard disk.

To connect an additional disk, double-click on the empty space in the list of virtual disks, or click on the respective icon to the right of that list. You can then select where the virtual disk should be connected to (primary master or slave or secondary slave) and which image to use. If you click on the “Select virtual disk” icon to the right, this will bring up the Virtual Disk Image Manager (see chapter 3.5, The Virtual Disk Manager, page 43 for details), where you can select a different image.

To remove a virtual disk, select it and click on the “remove” icon on the right.

We have dedicated an entire chapter of this User Manual to virtual storage: please see chapter 5, Virtual storage, page 75.

3.7.5 CD/DVD-ROM and floppy settings

In the VM Settings window, the settings in these two categories determine what VirtualBox provides as a floppy disk and as a CD/DVD-ROM drive to your VM’s guest operating system.

For both the floppy and CD/DVD-ROM categories, if the “Mount” checkbox is unchecked, VirtualBox will report to the guest that no media is in the drive. Oth- erwise, if the “Mount” checkbox is set, the following options are available:

•Host drive: The physical device of the host computer is connected to the VM, so that the guest operating system can read from and write to your physical device. This is, for instance, useful if you want to install Windows from a real installation CD. In this case, select your host drive from the drop-down list presented.

•Image file: Quite similar to virtual hard disks, this presents a file on your host as a device to the guest operating system. To use an image file, you must first import it into the Virtual Disk Manager; see chapter 3.5, The Virtual Disk Manager, page

43. The image file format varies depending on the type of device:

–For floppies, the file must be in raw format.

–For CD- and DVD-ROMs, the file must be in ISO format. Most commonly, you will select this option when installing an operating system from an ISO file that you have obtained from the Internet. For example, most Linux distributions are available in this way.

All these settings can be changed while the guest is running. Since the “Settings” di- alog is not available at that time, you can also access these settings from the “Devices” menu of your virtual machine window.

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