running virtual box for netware

[NeXTuser]

I have it purchased years ago and is still using under vmware Fusion on Mac.
But want to migrate to VirtualBox unless it couldn't.

[michaln]

All acceleration: disable

Why?

When load ideata.nlm, it says

NBI-2.25-11: Warning: This version of NetWare does not support
protected mode BIOS accesses, Without a loader patch some PCI drivers
may fail.

What exactly did you do? I didn't see this warning message.

After chooing "Disk Options", choose "Partition Tables", then it hanged.
I tried different config and follow every detail in different posts,
this is the last point I can reach.

I did not see this problem either. I had trouble installing additional software from floppies (perhaps may be worked around by copying to hard disk first, or installing from a CD/ISO image), but I was able to create and mount a SYS volume.

I started out with a VM created for the DOS guest type and default settings.

[michaln]

I was able to set up a NetWare 3.12 server using the IDEATA.HAM disk driver and PCNTNW.LAN network driver in VirtualBox, and I could connect to it from a DOS client running LSL 2.20, PCNTNW.COM, ODI, and VLM.

Setting up the server was a pain, though the steps are pretty well documented by Novell. The client worked straight away (as soon as I found updated LSL). I was actually surprised how easy the client part was. Both VMs were using bridged networking; obviously the default NAT wasn't going to do any good.

[fkeith]

The netware server 3.12 is used only to access old accounting data maybe once or twice a year.

after trying a lot of solutions I zeroed down on clonezilla which kinda worked for me

I had successfully cloned the netware partition and also the fat16 partition using the software clonezilla using the dd command which is exact copy over the network to a clonezilla shared drive.

and then restored it to virtual box disk (vdi) to a fixed disk of 8gb using the clozilla.iso boot version.

unfortunately the restore process of the raw format to the virtual disk of 4.5 gb took around 18 hours over the network. but finally was able to restore it.I then configued my virtual box machine with the config below.

my config for the virtual box is

system:-128 mb ram chipset PIII3 no extended features selected
processor: 1 execution cap 100 extented features: enable pae/nx
display:video memory 8mb no extented features selected.
storage:scsi controller type buslogic and using the option use host i/o cache
audio: disabled
network: internal network selected adamter type Pcnet Fast III(Am79C973)

After switching on the virtual box machine i was happy to see the dos partion boot and load the server.exe. I then needed the right driver for the same.

after searching in the forums i found that the driver BLMM3.HAM works but u need to patch it it to take the ham driver.so i went ahead in patching the netware 3.12 system.

after that i ran

load npapatch
load scsihd.cdm
load blmm3.ham

I then got this that the buslogic scsi card was sussessfully registered

BusLogic.Ham: Card at slot 10005 (IO Port 0xd240) successfully registered.
Novell scsi fixed disk cdm
netware elevator filter
etc.....

i then went to load install

there i went to volumes it showed me the to 2 volumes sys and data

I was too good to be true.

I clicked on escape and went back to the prompt

and ran the command load sys
mounting voulume sys
initializing transaction tracking system
dgwd:
system halted tuesday march 13, 2012 2:37:39 pm
abend: A directory buffer with no dirty bits set was encountered on the dirty list
os version : Novell netware v3.12 (25 user) 8/12/93
running process :directory cache process
stack: 00 00 00 00 78 56 34 12 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 .......
press Y to copy diagnostic image to disk otherwise power off and back on to restart.

the system came to a halt and had to reboot.

Any suggestions as i have spent almost a year to get this working and finally have successfully cloned the my old failing scsi hdd and successfully booted the fat partition.
just need to mount the SYS voulume and hopefully everthing should run smoothly.

why am i unable to mount the sys volume the data volume mounts fine

Regards

Keith

[michaln]

I'd try plain old IDE disks and IDEATA.HAM.

Unfortunately from the error message you got there's no indication what went wrong, it could have been anything from misconfiguration to data corruption during transfer.

[fkeith]

i am attaching the screen prints for the same.

regards

keith

vrepair showed no errors

Screenshot1.png (46.78 KiB) Viewed 4524 times

vrepair showed no errors

Screenshot1.png (46.78 KiB) Viewed 4524 times

[michaln]

With what little I know about NetWare, all I can say to those errors is that they look interesting. You'd need a NetWare expert to tell you what they mean.

I'd recommend trying to set up a NetWare 3.12 installation from scratch with IDE disks only as a test to see whether it works sufficiently well. That way you eliminate the possibility of issues caused by transferring an existing setup running on more or less different hardware.

The instructions here http://developer.novell.com/devres/stor ... p_312.html are pretty good, and this http://www.vmts.net/article/installnovell.htm may also be helpful.

FWIW, I was able to set up NetWare 3.12 in VirtualBox (with NWPA and IDE disk) and it seemed to work without any obvious problems (i.e. I was able to connect from a DOS client and browse/run files). But I didn't really stress test it and my knowledge of NetWare is extremely limited, so I could have easily missed something.

[mousepad]

I know I'm rather late to the party, but I feel as though my experience would help anyone else with this problem.

I've tried out NetWare 3.12 on Virtualbox before. For classic Novell experience, it's a great OS. However, you can't do much of anything because before being able to do anything at all, you have to create the SYS: volume and have Netware fill it with data. Alas, this is not possible due to VirtualBox not supporting NetWare's disk drivers (at least, this version. I have v4 somewhere around here that I'll try soon to see if it's got the same issue). NetWare 5.1 and 6 have no problems running under Virtualbox, and they can both create SYS. Unlike what was said earlier, VREPAIR doesn't do anything to a volume that consistently gives errors about directory problems (again, because Virtualbox and Netware 3.12 don't play well together). For this, I'd say to try QEMU or VMware (as much as Virtualbox is great, it hasn't got the support necessary for classic OSes).

[Mrki]

Hi,
I have somehow made this thing working, but I cannot force XP client for Netware to connect to server. This client machine, however, connects to a physical machine containing Netware 3.12.

PCNTNW.LAN did not complain about anything.

You told that this works nicely for DOS client.
However I am not sure I understand which DOS client.
Is this a command line on Windows (please state the version, since Windows 7 does not support IPX/SPX protocol) or some other emulation.

Thanks.