VB seems easy to use. Set up everything fine including hard disk etc. Bootable DOS floppy works great; immediately impressed w/ simplicity of it all.
But typing "C:\" gets me an "invalid drive specification"!
I can't imagine a simpler test case - what is going wrong here???
Newbie - DOS boot floppy - works but can't access C:
Thought you had it but...
Never thought of that; silly. But I can't do it thru VirtualBox menus?, and when I copied "format.com" to my boot floppy (a real one by the way) I get "can't run in DOS mode". I'm also thinking I need "FDISK"? And I can't find it anywhere on my XP machine.
I'm just in a base testing attitude here, understand. I'd be happy at this point w/ a DOS prompt and the ability to copy files from my real drive to a virtual "C:" but I'm stuck right out of the box. <sg>
And you implied I might be using the virtual drive AS a boot floppy..? I can't seem to find ANY way to do that unless it's the 'drive image' thing..?
I'm just in a base testing attitude here, understand. I'd be happy at this point w/ a DOS prompt and the ability to copy files from my real drive to a virtual "C:" but I'm stuck right out of the box. <sg>
And you implied I might be using the virtual drive AS a boot floppy..? I can't seem to find ANY way to do that unless it's the 'drive image' thing..?
OK, from the beginning.
Think about your virtual machine as a personal computer staying on your desktop without a hard disk. Open it and mount a new hard disk (this is what you are doing with the menus of the VirtualBox GUI Virtual Disk Manager to create a VDI and attach it to your VM). Now insert the DOS-floppy into the floppy-drive and boot DOS. You can't see the new mounted hard disk because it must be partitioned with fdisk and formated with format (we are living with DOS!). If you do a
format C: /s
you are able to boot from your new hard drive C:.
Do It!
You cannot do this thru VirtualBox menus outside your virtual machine. It's like you are trying to write to the hard disk in your PC on the desktop with a pencil from your desktop.
EDIT: For all of doing this you need a complete DOS system boot diskette with fdisk.exe and format.exe etc. In the next step you can make an image of this floppy and boot from that instead of the real floppy (all is virtual). But I think you don't need that. Your hard drive is bootable ;-)
By the way if you understand how your virtual machine is encapsulated you may understand that there is no easy way to copy data from your real drive (that contains the virtual drive of your DOS-Box) to the virtual drive, especially under DOS.
Think about your virtual machine as a personal computer staying on your desktop without a hard disk. Open it and mount a new hard disk (this is what you are doing with the menus of the VirtualBox GUI Virtual Disk Manager to create a VDI and attach it to your VM). Now insert the DOS-floppy into the floppy-drive and boot DOS. You can't see the new mounted hard disk because it must be partitioned with fdisk and formated with format (we are living with DOS!). If you do a
format C: /s
you are able to boot from your new hard drive C:.
Do It!
You cannot do this thru VirtualBox menus outside your virtual machine. It's like you are trying to write to the hard disk in your PC on the desktop with a pencil from your desktop.
EDIT: For all of doing this you need a complete DOS system boot diskette with fdisk.exe and format.exe etc. In the next step you can make an image of this floppy and boot from that instead of the real floppy (all is virtual). But I think you don't need that. Your hard drive is bootable ;-)
By the way if you understand how your virtual machine is encapsulated you may understand that there is no easy way to copy data from your real drive (that contains the virtual drive of your DOS-Box) to the virtual drive, especially under DOS.