Creating a DOS 7 VM

[mpack]

At Socratis' request I'm splitting this peripheral discussion off from the previous topic.

BTW, there's no official MS-DOS 7, so I don't know where you got yours...

p.s. DOS 7 was the DOS underbelly of Win98. If you told Win98 to create a bootable floppy, it was DOS7. So while it was never released by itself, it's certainly official. I have a DOS7 VM myself that I created out of curiosity, and it's as complete a DOS implementation as my DOS 6.22 VM is. The main feature that sets it apart from previous DOSes as I recall is support for FAT32 drives.

[socratis]

So while it was never released by itself, it's certainly official.

(Emphasis mine...)

Aha! That's why I'm not familiar with it!
Got to check my Win98 VM to see what's under the hood, believe it or not, I always thought it was a 6.22 DOS there...

But it seems you're absolutely right! MS-DOS 7 in Wikipedia says that it comes with all the 9x Windows, 7.0 for Win95, 7.1 for Win98. But, when I tried to find the version, this is what I got:

[quote]
C:\WINDOWS>ver

Windows 98 [Version 4.10.2222]
[/quote]

Hmm... That looks more like something that you'd get from a modern Windows command prompt, not from a DOS one. Got to dig some more...

I have a DOS7 VM myself that I created out of curiosity

I believe that we might share the same curiosity! Can you share the instructions/how-to?

Perhaps in a new thread as to not taint this one any more?

[mpack]

I don't really remember too much about creating the VM. I think I just created a Win98 VM (or cloned an existing one), and then just deleted everything off the C: drive except for COMMAND.COM, then built it up just as I would any other DOS install.

Yes, DOS reports the version as Windows 98 [ Windows 4.x ], but I'm sure it could be patched to say DOS 7 if anybody cared to!

I do have a DOS folder in that VM with all the usual DOS tools, I have no memory of how I came by that. Possibly it's just a copy of the DOS 6.22 tools folder.

Incidentally, if you format a floppy in the GUI of either Win98 or XP, there's an option on the dialog to create an MS-DOS startup disk - you can use this disk to create a VM. This implies that somewhere in the XP Windows folder structure there's an image of a DOS startup disk, with tools, ready to be written to a floppy. My memory was that it was an identifiable file, but this web page points to a resource inside the DISKCOPY.DLL file. This may be a source of DOS7 versions of FDISK and FORMAT etc that support FAT32.

[socratis]

Impressive! Especially the part about the WinXP being able to create a DOS startup disk! Never ever noticed that bit, it's definitely worth exploring!

Thanks Don!

I'll see what I come up with, maybe have a HowTo after the whole exercise...

[mpack]

I'll make a correction: I just tried it and I'm sorry to say that the DOS startup disk created by XP is not very useful for making a VM, at least not on its own. You can indeed boot from the floppy, but my assumptions about what it would contain turn out to be incorrect: in particular no fdisk and no format tool. So, deleting all the files off a Win98 system disk is the only way I know of at the moment to create a bootable DOS7 hard disk based VM.

Incidentally, if you type "ver" after launching the XP-generated DOS startup disk then it claims to be Windows ME [Windows 4.9].