MS-DOS 3.30 in VirtualBox

putr4s

So, I downloaded "Microsoft MS-DOS 3.30 (5.25)" from the WinWorld archives, but when I tried to boot the first floppy, it simply hang with a _ on the screen, and CPU usage stayed at 25% (full 1 core utilization) until I power the virtual machine off. I plan to use it as a base to install Windows 1.0 in. Can anyone else try this and see what happens?

TCPMeta

Your best bet is to use a real VM such as Bochs and maybe VirutalBox to run DOS 3. You can use DOS 6 and just make it like to Windows that it is a earlier version.

SomeGuy

You may need to resize the disk images to 1.44mb with Winimage. I seem to recall Virtualbox didn't like other sized disk images, but I haven't tried that in a while. Note that earlier versions of DOS do not work on 1.44mb disks... unless you use a modified DOS 2.11: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=7265

Other emulators that are good for messing with earlier DOS, are PCEm, MESS, and QEMU.

putr4s

SomeGuy wrote:

You may need to resize the disk images to 1.44mb with Winimage. I seem to recall Virtualbox didn't like other sized disk images, but I haven't tried that in a while. Note that earlier versions of DOS do not work on 1.44mb disks... unless you use a modified DOS 2.11: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=7265

Other emulators that are good for messing with earlier DOS, are PCEm, MESS, and QEMU.

Simply resizing the images worked. But, for some reason the fdisk program hanged when I started it, so I ended up using MS-DOS 3.31, which was already in 1.44 MB format, and works just as well.