virtualbox.org

Hiho, VB board (hooray first post)

I more or less succesfully installed Win 95 on the VirtualBox, but for some reason VB (or the guest) fails to load floppys from the virtual floppy drive, which is emulated in VB. It worked fine when I installed, but after the first system reboot, when Win 95 installs some other vital files, it failed to read the floppy drive because "The device was not ready [error #15]". Windows 95 luckily starts without these files, but to play any games that require Hardware Acceleration and all that nonsense I need some form of drivers and those are on said floppys that windows 95 fails to read. Any suggestions?

A few issues here:

If a file cannot be read as a floppy image, it usually means it is not a true floppy disk image. This might be because it was a non-standard format disk to begin with, or because of some error in making the image. Or it might be that it is in an outdated format that the VBox BIOS doesn't support. Check that it is readable on a more recent virtual machine (ie one with a more modern OS).

You could instead put the files on a virtual CD-ROM.

Another option would be to put the guest and host on a single network, and transfer the files that way. This is fiddly with Win95 though, and I wouldn't suggest it for just this.

Consider using Windows 98 (preferably 98SE) rather than 95. There is hardly anything that will run on Windows 95 and not 98, and the latter is quite a bit more reliable. (It also includes updated floppy drivers.) In addition, it will work with USB, and you can use a USB stick to transfer files.

I must ask, though, what "Hardware Acceleration" do you mean to use (when you have got the floppy or equivalent to work)? If you mean just to install something like the BearWindows video driver, then that is fine. But you must have already downloaded this and managed to write it to the floppy. Drivers for your host video card will not work inside the virtual machine.