MED-V 1.0 SP1: CD/DVD/Optical Drive Access Appears Problematic

MED-V V1 SP1 running on either Vista or Windows 7:

If a workspace configured by policy to use the host machine’s optical drive starts without Optical Media injected (in either full desktop mode or seamless mode) the following may happen:

When you insert an optical disk post workspace start, the drive in Explorer will show the proper-media injected however when you try to open the workspace while the workspace is running you will get the error:

“Please Insert a disk into <TYPE> Drive (n:).”

Likewise – the same also happens inside the guest operating system as well.

After restarting the workspace, it is, however available to the host and guest.

This is caused by a combination of the process for VirtualPC not being elevated and the drive is captured only at startup for a standard user process.

There are four ways to work around this:

1.) Simply restart the workspace with the disk in the drive.

2.) Start the MED-V Client elevated (run as admin.)

3.) Disable UAC.

4.) Disable the feature in the workspace policy.

If required for guest OS’es use a drive mapping to the shared optical drive.