Then I went for my next experiment: Banyan Vines 8.5. It can be easily found via Google, so I fetched the install floppies and it looks like it can find the disk drive and install the base files. Then it tries to reboot to finish the install, but it is unable to mount the root filesystem. It looks like BV 8.5 is running a variant of UNIX from the System V 3.2 era. I have tried SCSI, both LsiLogic and BusLogic emulation, as well as straight IDE. Vines is unable to boot directly from disk in all three cases, but the installer can definitely see the disk and work with it.
Some digging around suggests that the installer is using direct BIOS calls to use the disk, but upon reboot, it uses something else and this is failing. The best hit I have had so far is the last message in this thread:
Except I have no idea what the LBA and cylinder size issues are, and that guy appears to never have posted his HOW-TO in a public location. I don't even know if they can be fixed in VBox. He doesn't identify what VM software he was using that allowed him to get farther, nor what his error was (same as mine?).I finally got it working (almost), except for a slight problem towards the end, which I have been unable to solve. I have written a how-to on installing it, based on what I've managed to figure out. It turns out to be an LBA and BIOS disk cylinder size issue. I will be making the how-to available to anyone who wants it.
Thoughts?