Unable to boot VM to Apple Superdrive (external USB CD/DVD)

IDF

Member
I have assigned the drive to be connected to the VM I am about to boot. It is a functional Windows 7 virtual machine.

I set VM boot order to include External device as the first device, and set External boot device to the Superdrive.

Drive starts out connected to Mac, visible in Finder.
When I start VM, Mac ejects the CD (or DVD - I have tried both).
I re-insert the disk immediately.

VM boot reports it is unable to initialize USB, and, even if I have no other boot device selected, boots to Hard Disk 1.

I have tried "Select boot device on startup" - I have to press Tab first before I can press Escape, but USB is not listed among the options I can choose from in the menu which appears.

I have also tried treating this as CD/DVD, but this makes no difference. It is unable to locate the SATA device. Since it's not an internal CD/DVD device, I wouldn't expect this to work.

I have, however, been able to boot to USB thumb drives.

I don't know if the problem is the eject of the disk from the Superdrive.

I see an old post at
http://kb.parallels.com/en/116509
That suggests hand-editing config.pvs to set these values:

<UsbController UhcEnabled_patch="1" dyn_lists="">
<UhcEnabled>0</UhcEnabled>
<EhcEnabled>0</EhcEnabled>
<XhcEnabled>0</XhcEnabled>
</UsbController>

My XhcEnabled is set to 1, which might be incorrect. But I don't know if this applies to my situation. I am able to see other external USB devices (external hard drives). And, this information applies to older versions of Parallels.

If I am already running the VM, and have the Superdrive device assigned to it, it will connect to Windows and I can review its contents.

Is there any way to connect this situation so I can boot to a CD or DVD? This is helpful in certain kinds of repair/recovery situations.

Thank you.
 
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