creepingnet
Veteran Member
Ok, so I have a 486 DX2 with a wonky Floppy controller (almost NONE of the floppy drives, cables, and the like, seem to work right in this machine), and I've got a 40GB Maxtor HDD that is setup with a DDO that I want to use in said 486. I also have a Dell 5100 that I could use but I don't feel like bothering with re-connecting it.
I have 2 Virtual Machine programs I can use, VirtualBOX (Windows/Linux), and Windows Virtual PC (windows live essentials version). Is there any way to map the physical drive to the Virtual Machine so it reads the DDO, allows me to write the data to the drive (as normal), and basically "Image Out" the drive before installing it in the computer.
I'm trying to avoid having to fix the Floppy Issue since every controller, cable, and drive I've put into it has failed to work (though, funny enough, they all work on my 286 just fine). On the 486, no matter which controller/cable/drive I use out of my stash, it fails to work. Drive A:\ (1.44MB 3.5") will see all the files on disk, Drive B:\is not even seen sometimes even if listed in the BIOS (usually the problem with Win95 and Win98), and A:\ will sometimes copy files but the files will be corrupt upon attempting to run an executable on the hard drive, or opening some other file, and sometimes, files won't even read/write but rather give errors.
So that's why I want to try this crazy workaround and wondered if anyone else here had experience with using a VM to build out a HDD, or bypassing DDO's to install an O/S.
I have 2 Virtual Machine programs I can use, VirtualBOX (Windows/Linux), and Windows Virtual PC (windows live essentials version). Is there any way to map the physical drive to the Virtual Machine so it reads the DDO, allows me to write the data to the drive (as normal), and basically "Image Out" the drive before installing it in the computer.
I'm trying to avoid having to fix the Floppy Issue since every controller, cable, and drive I've put into it has failed to work (though, funny enough, they all work on my 286 just fine). On the 486, no matter which controller/cable/drive I use out of my stash, it fails to work. Drive A:\ (1.44MB 3.5") will see all the files on disk, Drive B:\is not even seen sometimes even if listed in the BIOS (usually the problem with Win95 and Win98), and A:\ will sometimes copy files but the files will be corrupt upon attempting to run an executable on the hard drive, or opening some other file, and sometimes, files won't even read/write but rather give errors.
So that's why I want to try this crazy workaround and wondered if anyone else here had experience with using a VM to build out a HDD, or bypassing DDO's to install an O/S.