msdos 4.01

[Mousy]

Yes, DOS 4.x only has trouble booting from (virtual) hard disk. It has no problem using that same hard disk when booted from floppy. It's because the BIOS disk read service uses more stack space than the BIOS floppy read service.

There was no single MS-DOS 2.11, back then it was all OEM versions. And utilities like FDISK or FORMAT would have been written by the OEM. So without looking at whatever particular version you're using, I couldn't tell you what the problem might be.

I have successfully installed PC DOS 2.0 and 2.1 in VirtualBox, so that at least is possible. MS-DOS 2.x versions should in principle work too, but again it depends on what exactly the OEM did.

The 2.11 version I am trying to use is for the AT&T 6300 (There seems to be 2 versions of this also). Been doing some reading on the internet, seems that system only had 2 floppies and no harddrive. So it may be that it was re-designed not to use a harddrive, not really sure.
I did get it to work tho, I installed IBM-DOS(PC-DOS) v2.10 and for 2.11 install, just skipped the formatting part, and just did the sys.com.

[Mousy]

Yes, DOS 4.x only has trouble booting from (virtual) hard disk. It has no problem using that same hard disk when booted from floppy. It's because the BIOS disk read service uses more stack space than the BIOS floppy read service.

There was no single MS-DOS 2.11, back then it was all OEM versions. And utilities like FDISK or FORMAT would have been written by the OEM. So without looking at whatever particular version you're using, I couldn't tell you what the problem might be.

I have successfully installed PC DOS 2.0 and 2.1 in VirtualBox, so that at least is possible. MS-DOS 2.x versions should in principle work too, but again it depends on what exactly the OEM did.

The 2.11 version I am trying to install is AT&T 6300 MS-DOS 2.11, although there seems to be 2 versions out there (AT&T 6300 & AT&T 6300 2.00) are listed as they boot up. Both have the same problem.

Yes I have those PC-DOS's installed and the installs went fine and also PC-DOS 1.0 and 1.1 booted up just fine, although as someone mentioned, not much you can do with them. Seems that PC-DOS works ok and I am beginning to think that maybe all the different OEM version of MS-DOS might be the whole problem as I am sure that takes lots of programming to make them all work on VirtualBox.

[michaln]

Well, the AT&T 6300 wasn't quite a PC, really. I'm pretty sure PC DOS didn't run on AT&T 6300 and AT&T's OEM version of MS-DOS didn't run on IBMs. VirtualBox emulates more or less a (large) superset of the IBM PC/AT, so any old software that wouldn't run on a PC/AT isn't going to run on VirtualBox either.

For example, the 8086 version of XENIX is not going to work because it can only work with the PC/XT disk and keyboard controller (and maybe other components, too). If you want to run such software, you need some old PC emulator, not VirtualBox.

[Kronos]

I had this problem whit virtualbox.
Now i use Connectix Virtual PC 5.1 + IBM DOS 2.0 (Vetusware)
Connectix Virtual PC 5.1 support DOS. Now is MS Virtual PC, but dont support old DOS.

[michaln]

I had this problem whit virtualbox.

Which problem?

Any version of PC DOS will work in VirtualBox 4.2, including PC DOS/MS-DOS 4.0.