On Wed, 14 Jul 2021 at 15:05, kaye n <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello Friends > > My host is a linux OS. I think I have successfully installed FreeDOS in > VirtualBox. > > When the virtual FreeDOS is running, I want to be able to access my USB flash > drive as well as a Windows partition on the physical hard drive. > > I assume this is not possible?
Not enough info -- but I can tell you that yes, this is possible, but not easy. VirtualBox can share local drives on the host with a guest OS using SMB networking. Stage 1: sharing the drive Your Linux system must mount your Windows partition, so that VBox can see it to share it. If you do not automatically mount the Windows partition at boot, step 1 is: work out how to do that, and make it happen on startup. (This is not essential but makes life easier.) This means you must ensure the Windows partition and mount point's permissions are such that the user account that runs VirtualBox can read and write the Windows partition. Then, you can share it in VBox settings. But that is only the 1st half of the operation: the sharing stage. The 2nd stage is connecting to the shares This means that you must install a network stack on your copy of FreeDOS inside the VM. You will have to pick a network card in VBox that there are DOS drivers for, then install a network stack with those drivers. Then, you must install TCP/IP on that stack. (DOS networking was before TCP/IP caught on, and usually uses now-obsolete network protocols such as Microsoft NetBEUI or Novell IPX/SPX. Those are no use today. You need TCP/IP and that often means installing an additional network protocol.) Then, once you have this working and your DOS VM gets a TCP/IP address and you can see the host, you can connect to the shared drives in VBox from DOS. Summary: yes, it is possible, but it is not easy! :-) The 2nd thing you asked was accessing a USB key. There are 2 ways to do this. [1] Mount the USB key in Linux, make it a shared drive in VBox, and access it from the DOS VM the same was as the other shared drives described above. [2] Use VBox to make it a dedicated device for the VM -- not recommended, because FreeDOS doesn't have much in the way of USB support and so it will need a lot of extra work to get it shared. If this sounds intimidating and scary, well, it's because it is. So I would like to suggest a 3rd alternative: * Set up 2 drives for your DOS VM: a boot drive (C:) and a separate 2nd data drive (D:) Do this as 2 separate virtual hard disks in VBox. * Then, stop the DOS VM. * Make a new VM using a DOS-compatible OS such as Windows 95B or Windows 98SE. Install this, update it, make sure networking is enabled and working. * Next, connect your FreeDOS data drive to the new Win9x VM as the Win98 VM's D drive as well. * When you want to get stuff to/from the host, stop DOS and boot Win98. Use Win98 to get stuff on/off the host and save it on the data drive. * When finished, stop the Win98 VM and start your DOS VM. There are the files on the D drive. Work on them as you wish, then to put them back on the host, stop DOS and restart Win98. It's clunky but it's easier than configuring DOS networking. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
