How do you install Dos in P-Desktop MAXOSX?

[Wavelength]

Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Installation and Configuration in Mac OS".
Stacey M

Gang,

I have an old pc with a ton of stuff that I would like access too. I cannot really figure out how to setup the VM. I have dos on floppies... but the VM will not allow floppy access.

I was also hopping to create 2 partitions on the drive for a C&D drive to emulate what is in my old PC. I have a Zip drive in the PC so I can hopefully xcopy everything off and get it on the MAC via a USB Zip drive that is around here.

Man it would be great to get that boat anchor off the desk.

Any help appreciated!
Thanks
Gordon

[rjbailey]

I'll be watching this thread, since I've got the same questions. Despite comments elsewhere on the board, it's not trivial to set it up. I've been unable to install either FreeDOS or MSDOS. If I learn anything in the meantime I'll let you know

[constant]

.
Firstly, pc's are very useful. You can install Linux on them.

As far as I am aware, Parallels does allow booting from floppy, so maybe you should check your boot order settings.
.

[rjbailey]

.
Firstly, pc's are very useful. You can install Linux on them.

We're talking about DOS here.


As far as I am aware, Parallels does allow booting from floppy, so maybe you should check your boot order settings.

Been there, done that. I get other errors during booting from a floppy or CD image.

[constant]

.
We're talking about DOS here.
Gordon spoke of getting a boat anchor off the desk. Install Linux instead, I say.

Been there, done that. I get other errors during booting from a floppy or CD image.
If there is more to the story, please tell.
.

[perpendicular]

It sounds like you have an existing install on your old machine. If that's the case then it should be fairly easy to get DOS up and running. Here's some quick steps to help get you going:

1) Download a boot disk for your version of DOS,
http://oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/bootdisk.htm
2) Extract the files and copy the .IMG file somewhere convenient
(note that you can open IMG files directly in OS X)
3) In your Parallels VM click Edit and create a floppy drive if you haven't already
4) Under Floppy Options > Image File select the file you extracted in step #2
5) Make sure Enabled and Connect at Startup are checked
6) Go to Booting Options and select Floppy, Hard Disk, CD-ROM
7) Start your VM, you should boot from the floppy image. If not, check steps above
8) Once you've booted run fdisk and format from your floppy to set up your hard drive
9) After your HD is setup run 'sys c:' to copy the necessary files to boot from
10) If you can acces your USB Zip under DOS then copy your files, otherwise you might
want to try a bootable linux dist like puppy linux (boot cdrom from iso file) to ftp your files
11) Stop your VM and change Booting Options back to Hard Disk, Floppy, CD-ROM

If you have floppy access on your Mac and want to install from your floppies:
1) Open a terminal (Finder>Application>Utilties>Terminal)
2) type: dd if=/Volumes/floppy of=/tmp/floppy1.img
where /Volumes/floppy is the path to your floppy drive (not sure what the real path would be)
3) Repeat step #2 for each of your floppies, changing the name for each (floppy2.img etc.)
4) In your VM create floppy drives for each of your floppies and point to the images
5) Change the Booting options to floppy and start your VM

There may be some info missing here but I hope it at least sets you in the right direction.
Remember that there's info about all this stuff on the Internet so do some searching if you
get stuck anywhere.

[Wavelength]

Perpendicular,

Thanks for the help but for some reason Parallels does not like the disk images even though the OS can mount these just fine.

Maybe someone knows why Parallels errors out on the images (tried PCDOS 2000, PCDOS 7 and MsDos 6.22).

Parallels error say it is an ivalid disk image and it cannot be opened????

Double click on them and osx mounts them.

Any ideas, sorry for the delay here my mac went south with a memory problem just got it back.

Thanks
Gordon

[telno]

having just posted this on another similar thread, i thought I'd post it here also.

i was having this same problem and my solution was to instead create CD images with all the files I needed.

Here's how...

For the boot CD images, get them from AllBootDisks.com ... they have MSDOS 6.22, Win 95, 98, etc.. and they all work with Parallels. After booting from these images you can easily format your parallels hard drive and make it bootable (use FDISK followed by FORMAT followed by copying all the MSDOS files from the boot CD into a folder on the hard drive)

The remaining steps are only useful once you have a bootable hard disk..... Make sure to set your boot order in Parallels to try hard disk first, then CD/floppy.



Now you're ready to copy all the files from all your flopping IMG installation disks into a folder on your desktop. After you've copied all the disks into this folder, create a PC/Mac CD image based on the folder (this is an ISO image).

Do this in a terminal window (find it in the applications/utilities folder). The first command here changes to the directory you just created (say, MyInstallFiles, in my example), and the second one creates the ISO image:

example:

CD desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -o MyInstallFiles MyInstallFiles/



You can now mount this image in Parallels as a CD drive. When you boot into Parallels, just change to the CD drive and you'll have access to all the installation files.

example (if R: is the CD drive letter):

R:
dir




I hope this helps! I spent a good amount of time trying to figure this out myself!

[rjbailey]

Thanks! This really helped.