VirtualBox will not start when a read-only floppy image is mounted => Fixed in SVN

[Mike Swanson]

When setting up a VirtualBox with a floppy image without write permissions (I want to make sure the contents of the image are not changed), VirtualBox will fail to start with an error that it cannot open the file for writing (as expected). Version 3.0.x and earlier did not have this issue.

Although I am not sure what, if anything, happened if an explicit write attempt were made. I simply did this for extra safety of the integrity of the images...

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

I'm also affected by this (#6420). In my case the floppy image is in /usr/share, so I'd have to make a temporary copy to make it writeable. Isn't it possible to consider read-only images like read-only floppy disks? (with the hole uncovered?)

[Donuts]

This deficiency is quite inconvenient. In my case, I have images of the master floppy disks for several applications (which are read-only). In order for VirtualBox to be able to mount them, I have to copy them to a temporary directory and make the copies read-write.

As mentioned above VirtualBox could simply consider read-only images as write-protected floppy disks. To more comprehensively address this issue, there could also be a global setting to treat all floppy images as write-protected. That would give the user some assurance that their master images won't be modified by VirtualBox, even if the images have read/write permissions. A per-image checkbox in the virtual media manager so that individual images can be marked as being write-protected would be good too.

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks for the report! Finally fixed in the next major release.