old application can't install in Win7 32bit guest

[JimA]

I have an old application that is picky. A little history might be useful. I had an old Win95 3.5 inch floppy application, that I bought a Win98 CDROM upgrade for. So I only need to install the Win95 floppies so the Win98 CDROM will get past looking for the old application.

I made sure the media is good and installed everything on a Win 7 Starter (32bit) PC. Only issues is the Win98 application needs to run in Win98 SP2 compatibility mode. So all this works on real hardware. But I want to eliminate maintaining this PC just for one application.

So on my Ubuntu 14.04.3LTS workstation, I installed Virtualbox Version 5.0.14 r105127 and extension pack. I can create the Win 7 32 bit guest with no issues using the same install CDROM. I put images of all the install floppies and CDROMs for the application on the Ubuntu PC. I was able to install the floppy application with no issues. However, the CDROM application will not install giving me an immediate error: " D:\setup.exe is not a valid Win32 application"

I've tried running the setup using the compatibiltiy option, which I didn't have to do on real hardware.

I've also tried installing the CDROM application on a Win98 and WinXP virtual machine as well. Same issue.

Is this solvable? How should I proceed?

[socratis]

I put images of all the install floppies and CDROMs for the application on the Ubuntu PC.

1) How exactly did you do that?
2) Have you tried to install your application by using the actual CD instead of a CD-image? With pass-through enabled if you have to?

[mpack]

Are you sure you created a 32bit guest? In fact let's not speculate, please provide a VM log file: with the VM fully shut down, right click it, save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip, and attach the zip here.

Back in the day installers, for example your Setup.exe, were often 16bit apps. This was true well into the Win98 era, and the wording of the error message makes me suspect that is your problem. 32bit Windows prior to Win10 still had 16bit support, however it has been dropped from 64bit Windows. Hence my question.

[JimA]

I put images of all the install floppies and CDROMs for the application on the Ubuntu PC.

1) How exactly did you do that?
2) Have you tried to install your application by using the actual CD instead of a CD-image? With pass-through enabled if you have to?

#1. can't say for sure, but it must have been wrong. I went back and did sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=disk1.iso and it work. Thanks for challenging me.
#2. I also went back and tried the physical CRDOM in a drive and it worked as well.

For fun, I also just copied the files over to a directory and installed from the setup.exe in a directory.

So problem solved. I decided to go back to a WinXP guest since it all works better there and this is all the VM will be use for.

Thanks for the help.

[JimA]

Are you sure you created a 32bit guest? In fact let's not speculate, please provide a VM log file: with the VM fully shut down, right click it, save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip, and attach the zip here.

Back in the day installers, for example your Setup.exe, were often 16bit apps. This was true well into the Win98 era, and the wording of the error message makes me suspect that is your problem. 32bit Windows prior to Win10 still had 16bit support, however it has been dropped from 64bit Windows. Hence my question.

Checked and it is 32bit. As I've already posted, it was the ISO image file being corrupted. CDROM worked fine as well as correctly created .iso files worked.

Thanks,

[JimA]

This is more of an FYI for me, but I tried all this on a Mac OS X 10.11.1 and everything worked except when I ran my application I got transmission errors on the writing to an external USB device. Didn't have that issue with Ubuntu 14.04. So since I have a solution, I'll forget it's broken on the Mac.