how to make a formatted floppy disk for virtualbox dos machine

So I took Oracle's Virtualbox again, and booting from the floppy worked.īUT. I tried VMWare Player 5 (and also later some other versions), but VMWare is NOT able to boot from a MS-DOS 4.01 boot disk - this is very strange. and then the NIGHTMARE began.īecause the offered MS-DOS 4.01 boot floppy disk images were 720KB or 1.44MB disks, I had the idea to convert them by using a virtual machine. You have to use SPINRITE (or similar software) again to correct this.

This utility from Tandon did not really format my MFM HDD correct, it doesn't recognized most of the bad blocks of the HDD (it marked it again as usable. You are not able to transfer the MS-DOS system itself with FORMAT /S, instead, you have to use 'FXPREP'. I tested Tandon DOS 3.3, but this version was NOT really usable.

So I had the idea to try other DOS versions. The DOS I used before was IBM DOS 3.2, but this DOS version's keyboard driver was not really compatible with my 101-key keyboard from Cherry (which can be configured also to be used with a PC XT, not only with an PC AT machine). Meanwhile I own an IBM PC XT, and I wanted to reinstall a DOS. There are some web sites offering a floppy disk image of MS-DOS 4.01, but you can't do anything with it - except with a real PC.

How to make a formatted floppy disk for virtualbox dos machine