oracle virtual box dos disk problems

[Sila Drenja]

I just setup new DOS virtual machine because I'm learning DOS commands and how to operate it in school. we are learning trought cmd prompt which is emulation of DOS, but I wanted to experience how is it like to use real DOS. Now, I setup new vm and everything and created new virtual disk image and, when I start vm, it boots fine and everything, but I am in hard drive A: which is write protected. I tried switching to another disk(tried all alphabet, English and Croatian letters) and still in A disk. Like they don't exist, any help?

btw, I said about vm to teacher and she wants me to bring t to school so I want to show off in class. So I need it fixed as fast as I can. I have to bring at it tomorow morning

[Omega]

A:\ and B:\ are the floppy disks.

[Sila Drenja]

My floppy disk section is set to empty

[Omega]

Цитата допису Matejcraft100_yt:

My floppy disk section is set to empty

DOS probably doesn't know that.

[Sila Drenja]

yea, but how can I tell it that I left it another disk? I tried writing C: as I would do in cmd to change disk and it says syntax error (C: is just an example, as I said I tried all alphabet letters)

[Omega]

The CMD is not exactly the same as DOS.

Also why do you want to know how DOS works? Nobody uses DOS anymore.

[Sila Drenja]

I'm learning it in school. I'm going in school for IT technician and later I'm going to go for programmer on colleage, and now we are learning DOS for some reason. probably they want us to know to get around in all OS

[Omega]

Tell them to teach you Linux instead.

[Sila Drenja]

hahahhaa

[Cathulhu]

Why learn DOS? It went obsolete decades ago. Seriously. You'd be better off learning Linux bash or Windows Powershell commands.

[RGX12]

Цитата допису Matejcraft100_yt:

I just setup new DOS virtual machine because I'm learning DOS commands and how to operate it in school. we are learning trought cmd prompt which is emulation of DOS, but I wanted to experience how is it like to use real DOS. Now, I setup new vm and everything and created new virtual disk image and, when I start vm, it boots fine and everything, but I am in hard drive A: which is write protected. I tried switching to another disk(tried all alphabet, English and Croatian letters) and still in A disk. Like they don't exist, any help?

Matejcraft100_yt,

When you say you are learning "DOS commands" what exactly are you referring to? If you are talking about MS-DOS, the actual operating system which predates Windows, then this would be very strange, as that OS is indeed long obsolete. If you are simply talking about learning Windows command shell scripting, aka CMD commands, aka batch scripting, then this makes much more sense; however you don't need any sort of emulated environment to learn this. You can just fire up the Windows CLI/ "command prompt" either from the Start menu or from running cmd.exe, and just start directly entering commands (note that there are slight variations on the particular commands supported, depending on your version of Windows) and you can use any decent text/code editor for writing your command scripts. Simple.

(Note that you can also use the newer, and much more powerful "PowerShell" command line to run traditional CMD commands, but there is extra syntax involved, so it's a bit unwieldy).

If you really do in fact--for some reason--want a DOS-emulated environment, along with virtualized floppy disks, then I would recommend installing and running DOSBox, as this is much easier to configure and use than trying to set it up from scratch using VirtualBox.

[Sila Drenja]

IK and I am learning that that way, but I wanna experience what DOS felt like if oyu didn't get already

[RGX12]

Цитата допису Matejcraft100_yt:

IK and I am learning that that way, but I wanna experience what DOS felt like if oyu didn't get already

Lol, I'm not too sure what you're saying here... If my guess is correct and you REALLY want to experience MS-DOS, then like I said, DOSBox is your best bet, because it properly simulates the hardware that would have been available, with a minimum of configuration.

If you want to go even deeper, simulating what DOS would have been like running on an old 8088 processor (like from a classic IBM XT PC) then there is a new emulator on the scene, PCem: https://devtidbits.com/2017/08/25/pcem-emulate-the-tandy-1000-ms-dos-on-a-8088/
Give it a try.

[SimicEngineer]

Not being able to change to the C drive probably means it's not partitioned. You didn't really say which version of DOS you have or how you're booting it (read-only A: could be an emulated floppy booted from CD-ROM?). If I remember correctly, the last "real" release of MS-DOS (6.22) boots straight to an installer that partitions and formats the drive for you. But most versions of DOS aren't really super-picky about how they're installed, and various kinds of "Franken-DOS" installations were a fairly common sight back in the day. If you're using some kind of recovery disk you might be able to get a minimal DOS boot from the hard drive going with something like:

fdisk (create a primary partition, but do not mark it active yet)
(fdisk reboots the VM)
format c: /s
fdisk (mark the partition active)
(fdisk reboots the VM again)

FDISK is the DOS tool for partitioning hard drives. If you don't know, a "partition" is basically just a way of dividing up the hard drive into multiple "virtual disks". But even if you don't want more than one, you still need at least one partition because of how the system boots. Marking the partition active tells the BIOS that it should try to boot from that partition.

FORMAT is the DOS tool for creating the actual file system (all the data structures that keep track of files on the disk). The /S part specifies to create a "system" disk, which basically means installing a boot sector and the core DOS components (for MS-DOS these are MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, and COMMAND.COM, but only COMMAND.COM is visible; the others are hidden) to make the disk bootable.

However, when I say "minimal". I mean really minimal. You won't be able to do anything except use the commands built into COMMAND.COM [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMMAND.COM#Internal_commands

[Sila Drenja]

Цитата допису RGX12:

Цитата допису Matejcraft100_yt:

IK and I am learning that that way, but I wanna experience what DOS felt like if oyu didn't get already

Lol, I'm not too sure what you're saying here... If my guess is correct and you REALLY want to experience MS-DOS, then like I said, DOSBox is your best bet, because it properly simulates the hardware that would have been available, with a minimum of configuration.

If you want to go even deeper, simulating what DOS would have been like running on an old 8088 processor (like from a classic IBM XT PC) then there is a new emulator on the scene, PCem: https://devtidbits.com/2017/08/25/pcem-emulate-the-tandy-1000-ms-dos-on-a-8088/
Give it a try.

thx, just tried dosbox. It's missing some commands I know for sure are in dos as they were in my oracle simulation. 2 commands I'm almost completely sure are edit and TREE

[RGX12]

Цитата допису Matejcraft100_yt:

thx, just tried dosbox. It's missing some commands I know for sure are in dos as they were in my oracle simulation. 2 commands I'm almost completely sure are edit and TREE

Yeah, those are external commands. DOSBox is missing a few of them, primarily ones that aren't critical or that appeared in much later versions of DOS. If you're motivated, you can incorporate those commands back into DOSBox. 4-DOS is the answer. Follow the instructions discussed here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=55390