Not possible to freely assign which IDE port is used for which device => Fixed in SVN

[rcfa]

Some operating systems, among them OpenStep and NeXTSTEP, require non-standard assignment of CD-ROM drives and hard drives. It is seemingly currently not possible to assign the CD-ROM drive to the primary IDE slave port, only to the secondary master port. While it would be possible to edit the XML file to reflect different settings, launching such a machine results in an error.

Due to this, I cannot load drivers into the virtual machine which reside on a CD-ROM or CD-ROM disk image, because the CD drive can't be seen on the currently assigned IDE port.

The only alternative would be to use a SCSI CD-ROM drive, but since SCSI is not emulated by VirtualBox that's not an option either.

It really should be not up to the emulation software to decide on which port I have what. If we emulate a dual-channel IDE interface, each with master and slave device, then I should be able to have three CD-ROM drives and one hard drive, or four hard drives and no CD-ROM device, or a CD-ROM drive at some random, non-standard port.

Since VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop for other reasons are incapable of running OpenStep and NeXTSTEP, this is a total show-stopper to run some legacy OS.

[Frank Mehnert]

This will be fixed in the next major release.

[Technologov]

This is not fixed. You can only assign hard disks, but not CD-ROM. Reopening.

-Technologov

[Technologov]

Tested in v3.0.10.

[Frank Mehnert]

Did you actually read my last comment? I don't mean 3.0.10 but the next major version. However, I shouldn't have closed this bug.

[Frank Mehnert]

Fixed in VBox 3.1.0.