Win95/98SE Guests with Parallel Port tape drive

[U1tramarine]

Hi all,
I have an interesting question for you all.
We need to recover some data from some old tapes. We have the tape drive, which is a HP Colorado T1000e. This only has driver support for Windows 95

Now I have installed both Windows 95 and 98SE as seperate Vms for this.
They are both being run on an Ubuntu box and my Win7 laptop.

Using a post on this forum, I have managed to get the parallel port installed.

Now heres the thing, I have plugged the tape drive in after running the downloadable exe from HP and placed the files in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM

When I do add new Hardware, the system does not detect it. If I manually look for it, I can see a driver listed. The EXE does not give me an INI file, just a few system files for Windows 95.

After some reading around, it looks like it quite difficult for VMs to get this to work due to a lack of a proper DMA system. Has anybody got any ideas to get around this or can you guys suggest a VM manager that can do this?

Cheers

[mpack]

You don't mention the host OS. As yet, VirtualBox LPT is not officially supported, and even the unofficial feature only works on Linux hosts. LPT support is expected in v4.2.0 (currently in development).

And yes, if it's anything more strenuous than a printer then I wouldn't hold out much hope that it will work, on VirtualBox or any other VM platform. IMHO it would be best to install an OS natively, if it will let you. Or find another tape drive that can read the tapes and works with a modern OS.

If you don't want to overwrite an existing PC installation then I would make an image backup of it (using Acronis) first, which would be restored later. The PC would need to support IDE emulation mode. With that you should be able to get Win98 installed I would think.

[U1tramarine]

Hi MPack
I have it currently on the Linux Ubuntu box. I tried to get 95 and 98SE to install Natively on the machine but I couldn't not get it to boot properly after the setup. I suspect this is down to the hardware in the machine.