DOS ain't dead

Thank you one in all for the unbelievable help you have been to me.

The thing I need now is to move stuff which I make in Windows into the Virtual Hard Drive of FreeDOS under Virtual Box

Or for that matter, any other drive; Floppy, CD-ROM, USB, whatever.

SCENARIO

-+- I use my existing Windows Software to make a file

-+- I want to put that file onto the Virtual Hard Drive of FreeDOS under Virtual Box

=====

I seem to remember some option somewhere; possibly during some sort of install sequence; possibly in the settings; my brain can't keep that much inside at once.

How do I move stuff between Windows and FreeDOS under VirtualBox ?

> How do I move stuff between Windows and FreeDOS under VirtualBox ?

Several things you need to know. First of all, there are several Virtual Machine softwares out there. On my computer, I currently have VMWare, Bochs, PCEm, DOXBox-X, QEMU, and VirtualBox. They all have unique quirks and advantages/disadvantages.

One thing I like about both VMWare and DOXBox-X is that they can both mount a physical disk and don't need everything to be an image (usually either .VHD or .IMG) the way the other VMs do. That means that if you format your real hard drive with a DOS-compatible partition (FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32), you can simply put the files there and everyone can see them with no special machinations required. Of course, you need to force Windows not do its normal default installation and format the entire hard drive for itself. There are ways of fixing this after Windows is already installed, but they can be painful and confusing.

You can also do it via a network connection inside the VM to some sort of "file server" on the host, which is what I know a lot of people recommend. I personally don't like that approach very much, but have used it in the past.

The way I usually do it is with a program called ImDisk (you can download it for free). This lets you mount disk images of various types (floppy, hard drive, and CD) and manipulate them all you want in Windows. After I've manipulated the image to the point that it is what I want the VM to see, I unmount it from Windows and start up the VM. I can do it the other way also -- do something in the DOS VM, shut down the VM, and then mount the image with ImDisk in Windows. Again, note that I do NOT need to use ImDisk (or networking) with VMWare or DOSBox-X since they can work directly with real media (though they both have other things about them that I don't particularly like and that other VMs do better).

> Thank you one in all for the unbelievable help you have been to me.
>
> The thing I need now is to move stuff which I make in Windows into the
> Virtual Hard Drive of FreeDOS under Virtual Box
>
> Or for that matter, any other drive; Floppy, CD-ROM, USB, whatever.
>
> SCENARIO
>
> -+- I use my existing Windows Software to make a file
>
> -+- I want to put that file onto the Virtual Hard Drive of FreeDOS under
> Virtual Box
>
> =====
>
> I seem to remember some option somewhere; possibly during some sort of
> install sequence; possibly in the settings; my brain can't keep that much
> inside at once.
>
> How do I move stuff between Windows and FreeDOS under VirtualBox ?


I've used mkisofs and then had VirtualBox pointing at the image file. I think it's been renamed to genisoimage or xorriso in some places.

Something like
mkisofs -R -J -V "MY_ISO" -o mycd.iso mydir_of_files/

Delete and rerun the command if you add files to "mydir_of_files/". I'm sure there's also graphical ISO builders/editors too. I just don't use Windows very much.

Brain fog here.

I seem to remember, somewhere, when setting all this up, there was a place where the "host" and the "guest" could put a file (or multiple files, or even a tree or whatever) and the "other" one would see it, and could take it and use it.

I don't remember if that was in the FreeDOS setup, or the VirtualBox setup.

Even if I did remember, I can't pinpoint where.

Then again, this could be dreamy wishful thinking.