9.10.áAllowing a virtual machine to start even with unavailable CD/DVD/floppy devices

When, on VM startup, a CD, DVD or floppy device is unavailable, VirtualBox by default prints an error message and refuses to start the virtual machine. In some situations this behavior is not desirable.

The behavior can be changed for the CD/DVD drive with the following configuration change command:

VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM"
   "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#2/Config/AttachFailError" 0

The equivalent command for the floppy drive is:

VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM"
   "VBoxInternal/Devices/i82078/0/LUN#0/Config/AttachFailError" 0

You will still get a warning message that a device is not available. Some guest operating systems may show strange behavior when using saved state or snapshots, especially if a previously mounted medium is no longer available when the virtual machine is resumed.