Can't attach a physical CD/DVD-ROM?

Hi, I have purchased Parallels Desktop for Mac before visiting this forum and I am am having difficulties now. I tried to install Windows 98, but

1) The emulator can't attach my physical DVD-ROM for some reason (I have iMac), it shows some device access error.

2) When I loaded the Win98 boot floppy image using ISO file and formatted the virtual disc, after restart it show Operating system not found message and hangs. What can I do here?

 

Hi,

You can use CD image to install Windows 98. Just make ISO CD image of your physical CD using Dusk Utility application (/Application/Utilities). Then, use Typical setup in the Parallels Desktop wizard to install Windows 98 and use your CD image instead of physical CD.

Alexander

 

Yes, I did it yesterday.. Anyway, I have found that Parallels attaches only an empty DVD-drive in my case (then I need to insert a disc to work with it)

 

When you say you can't connect, are you talking about this screen:


or this screen:

 

Yes

Yes, I am trying to connect to the default DVD

It always fails when I have a disc inside.

I have iMac 20'' core2Duo

 

Have you tried swapping the IDE address from 0:1 to 1:0?
(You do this in the configuration editor).

If I understand correctly,
IDE 0:0 = channel 0, master disk
IDE 0:1 = channel 0, slave disk
IDE 1:0 = channel 1, master disk
IDE 1:1 = channel 1, slave disk.

Most report that problems with the CD drive are fixed by setting the hard drive to IDE 0:0 and the CD drive to IDE 1:0 instead of IDE 0:1. Others have had success doing just the opposite: Hard drive = IDE 1:0, CD drive = IDE 0:0.

The point is to put the hard drive on a different IDE channel from the CD drive.

--
Are there any steps from the link below that are helpful?
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=59121#post59121

 

does not help

that didn't help either. It seems that Parallels Desktop cannot connect to the drive, when it is mounted in Mac OS X. Only the empty drive can be connected.

 

But this screen shot is of Windows XP not Windows 98. If you are trying to upgrade to XP from 98, I don't recommend it as the results can be unpredictable. If you have a valid copy of Windows 98 and an upgrade version of XP, there are other ways of getting XP installed without actually trying to upgrade a Windows 98 VM. Use the search feature of these forums to find out those methods.

If you just want to use Windows 98 by itself instead as a stepping stone to and XP upgrade, then I suggest try hand-building a new Windows 98 VM from scratch using the step-by-step instructions linked in my previous post.

 

Not exactly

Yes, I installed XP on top of Windows 98 and then selected XP in virtual machine options.

BUT: I had CD the same -ROM problems in Windows 98 too.

 

I think it's safe to assume that Parallels emulates a different logic-board and chipset for Windows 98 than it does for Windows XP. This is why upgrading a Windows 98 VM to an XP VM and then changing the Parallels settings is not a good idea: it would be like unpluging your hard drive from one logic-board and connecting it to a different one and hoping it will work. You might get lucky, but don't count on it.

If it were me, and I had not already tried this, I would suspect that some files had been corrupted somewhere along the line and do the following:
1. Make sure I was up-to-date on all the Mac OS updates, possibly including a clean install of Mac OS X if I thought it might help.
2. After rebooting, make sure I was up-to-date on all the Parallels updates, again possibly completely uninstalling it, followed by a fresh install (rather than an upgrade), and then reboot.
3. If I had done a clean install of Mac OS 10.4.10, Parallels would be the first 3rd-party software I would install. That way I might be able to see if some other software introduced the problem I was having.
4. Manually build a new VM (rather than using Parallels automated process)
5. If all of these measures failed to fix the problem, I would then attempt to contact Parallels support and possibly submit a bug report through their proper channels, assuming of course that I haven't made any hardware modifications to my Mac.

From what you have described, it sounds like your VM cannot recognize/access your CD drive unless you first unmount it from Mac OS. If that is correct, it further leads me to suspect that there is file/driver corruption somewhere in your system. That's why a fresh /clean install of everything might be warranted.