I realize that RedHat is not responsible for VMware; however, the successful operation of VMware with RedHat Linux is critical to our plans to deploy Linux workstations here at the Spokane site of Agilent Technologies. And, something that changed between release 6.2 and 7.0 has rendered the CD-ROM drive essentially inaccessible from a VMware guest machine. I have filed an incident with VMware as well, of course. I think it would behoove RedHat to look into this as well. If I "disconnect" the CD-ROM in the VMware window, I can successfully mount, unmount, and access it from Linux. The VMware windows NT guest, on the other hand reports the following errors in its log: Dec 05 15:19:06: DISK/CDROM timeout of 2.790 seconds (ok) Dec 05 15:19:06: ATAPI_CDROM: read for /dev/cdrom failed: Invalid argument I did make sure that the CD was unmounted in the Linux host OS and that autorun was not going.
This is a duplicate of bug 21577 VMWare seems require either a kernel <= 2.2.15 or >= 2.2.17 for the CDROM to work.
Both vmware and the kernel have moved far on since this issue