Windows 98 in VirtualBox both recognizes hard drive and not?

[Winjas]

By "hard drive" I mean the virtual drive set up for the virtual machine. Nothing is installed yet and I'm running off a CD-ROM image.

First I get a message stating the virtual hard drive wasn't found:


Next I run CHKDSK, and apparently I have a 6gb hard drive:


In VirtualBox, I set up an 8gb drive, and made it dynamic as recommended here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y14uAC1GVfM

[stefan.becker]

"Recover aborted"

Is it a recovery disk?

[Winjas]

Das stimmt Herr Becker.

Könnte dieses mein Problem sein?

Is it looking for something on the VM drive that proves it's on the original HP Pavilion it was designed for? If that's the case, my only hope, short of a different version of the OS, is a new hard drive. The hard drive crashed on the original machine which is why I'm trying to run Virtual Windows 98 in 32-bit Windows 7.

[dlharper]

What you are looking at is not a 6Gb (virtual) hard disk, it is a 6Mb RAM disk.

I presume you have partitioned and formatted the hard disk. You have to do this on a virtual Windows 98 machine just as you do on a physical one before anything can be installed.

[Winjas]

If C:\ is a RAM disk, no wonder I can't format it. Where did it come from?

The virtual hard drive is not being recognized at all. It looks like all I'm getting is RAM disk C:\ and CD-ROM drive A:\.

Whereto from here?

[dlharper]

Booting from a Windows 98 start-up floppy or CD-ROM always creates a RAM disk. (MS introduced this with Win98 because there was not room on a single floppy for all the utilities they wished to include on the start-up disk. Prior to this, with Win95 (and of course DOS) you simply booted using the floppy, which itself became drive A:, and then you could run the utilities from there. A few more utlities added with Win98 made this impossible, and the way round it was to create a RAM disk and load the utilities to it.)

I am a little surprised that your CD-ROM appears as A: rather than D:. Drives A: and B: are normally reserved for floppies. However, you are using a non-standard recovery CD rather than an original Windows 98 CD, so it might set things up in an unusual way.

When you first boot Win98 from a floppy or CD, if you have an empty hard disk then the normal configuration you find is: Drive C: - RAM disk; Drive D: - CD-ROM; Drive A: - floppy if present. Since there is nothing on the hard disk, it won't appear in the drive list. After booting, the first job is to partition the hard disk. Use the FDISK.EXE program. Quite possibly the PATH variable will have been set up so that you only need to enter "FDISK" at the DOS prompt. If you get "Bad Command or Filename", then you will need to find the program (which will be on one of A:, C: or D:) and enter the full path name or navigate to that directory.

Accept all defaults in FDISK. When it finishes, reboot the VM. The drive letters will now have changed. C: will now be the hard disk (still empty, but the system now sees it); D: will now be the RAM disk; and E: will (probably) be the CD-ROM.

Now format the hard disk. Use "FORMAT C:" from the DOS prompt. (Again, if necessary find the FORMAT.EXE program and navigate to it.)

When that is finished, you can then start to install Windows. You can do this direct from the CD-ROM - just navigate to E: and enter "SETUP". Personally, I prefer to copy everything in the WIN98 directory to a directory on the hard disk and install from there. (My reason for doing this is that the CD-ROM is normally drive E: at this point. However, if you install from there then after the next re-boot the RAM disk is not present and the CD-ROM has changed to drive D:. This change confuses some of the installation routines and causes them to fail first time round.)

Best of luck! Windows 98 works quite nicely in VirtualBox, but it won't use Guest Additions and so there is a certain amount of extra work need to get everything working optimally. See the appropriate "Tutorial" posts in the "Windows Guests" section of this forum.

[mpack]

I am a little surprised that your CD-ROM appears as A: rather than D:. Drives A: and B: are normally reserved for floppies. However, you are using a non-standard recovery CD rather than an original Windows 98 CD, so it might set things up in an unusual way.

As a wild guess, I would suspect that the OP has not added a floppy controller to the VM recipe, hence drive letters A: and B: are available.

[dlharper]

As a wild guess, I would suspect that the OP has not added a floppy controller to the VM recipe, hence drive letters A: and B: are available.

It usually still defaults to D: though. It will depend on the CD driver and allocation program in use. The standard MSCDEX.EXE will use any available drive name from C: onwards, but doesn't seem to accept A: or B:. It might do so, however, if a different *.SYS driver file is used from the normal.

(Maybe getting a little off-topic here.)