Win98 - Disabling Floppy and Printer port

[BabaLooey]

Hi again,
Two more questions:
1) I have two floppies and I would lie to disable them, as I do not need them.
2) After solving a problem with APM/ACPI, now I have a printer port with question mark. How to disable that port?

Thanks in advance.

[mpack]

Leave the floppy drives, you may need them. Remember that the floppy drives are simulated (like the hard drives), so the fact that your host has no physical floppy drive is irrelevant. Win98 has no guest additions, and USB support is tricky, even network support has problems, so virtual floppy drives (using a floppy image file) have been known to provide a usable way to move small files into the VM.

As to the parallel port, have you tried simply right clicking it in device manager and removing it?

[BabaLooey]

Thanks for reply,

Well, floppy drives are more of annoyance then real problem. I keep clicking on them by the force of the habit, as there are no physical FDD on my real PC, and the first few drives are HDD. Shared folder is working OK.
USB seems to be working OK - USB mouse is recognized OK, and will test USB joystick later today.

I tried to remove LPT, but it reapers on each boot. Again, no problems, just a puzzle.
EDIT: LPT port has exclamation mark, not question mark over it.

[mpack]

USB seems to be working OK - USB mouse is recognized OK ...

Um. Be careful not to confuse virtual with physical. Your VM is almost certainly simulating a PS/2 mouse, not a USB mouse, i.e. the VM is not using a virtual USB controller to talk to that virtual device. The fact that the virtual mouse is mapped to a physical mouse connected to a host USB port... is not relevant to the VM. Ditto for a USB keyboard: neither requires USB support in either VirtualBox or the guest OS.

My comment about USB was a reference to Win98s weak support for USB in general, e.g. no native USB mass storage drivers.

[BabaLooey]

Thanks for explanation.
USB looks like it is working well now. I've installed that Oracle VM Extension Pack, some issues there, but joystick is working OK. Will post later on in separate topic.

So, no way to remove FDD and LPT?

[mpack]

So, no way to remove FDD and LPT?

You can remove the floppy drives from device manager, shut down, then remove the floppy controller from the VM settings. The latter step stops the hardware being rediscovered. The LPT would be disabled in similar fashion, however there is no GUI option to remove the LPT from the VM settings, and no documented VBoxManage command either. I would just edit the .vbox xml, if I cared about it.

[BabaLooey]

There is only one instance in my file Win98.vbox that is related to floppy, and nothing else but this:

Code: Select all

      <FloppyImages/>

There are two identical instances for LPT:

Code: Select all

        <LPT>
          <Port slot="0" enabled="false" IOBase="0x378" IRQ="4"/>
          <Port slot="1" enabled="false" IOBase="0x378" IRQ="4"/>
        </LPT>

I've removed LPT in W98, then deleted everything between first <LPT></LPT>, saved and booted up W98.
Now, there is no more exclamation mark over LPT, Dev Manag shows it as working OK. But, I do not have anything to plug into LPT, so cannot test it properly.

When opened vbox xml again after shut down, above deleted content appeared once again.
Then I've deleted both instance in full, including tags. W98 showed up LPT as problematic. I've removed it and rebooted. But, after boot LPT appeared again, working OK, and also both instance in xml appeared.

[mpack]

I did not recommend that you edit the xml to get rid of the floppy drive - you can and should do that using the GUI. And note that it's the floppy disk controller you need to remove, not a floppy disk image (which is what the <FloppyImages> tag is about). Do it with the GUI and you are less likely to delete the wrong thing.

On the LPT, again you should not delete the tag, I had in mind instead to set the enabled fields to false - though it seems that was already the case? In that case there is nothing else you can do to get rid of it.

I'm not sure what you meant about testing LPT: VirtualBox doesn't support LPT anyway, it just has a stub for future development that may never happen.