2nd Hard Disk in DOS

Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Other Guest OS Types Discussion".
Stacey M

I'm trying to do what I thought would be a simple thing, getting a virtual DOS 6.22 to recognize a second virtual hard disk.

I've gotten everything else working in the DOS session, even the CD drive support, but I can't get DOS to see the second hard disk.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I have to do?

Thanks.

--JT

 

JT,

Well you actually have to do this at the start. When you fdisk the drive specify 2 partitions instead of one. That is what I did.

I guess you could try this but I have not tried this. You could edit the VM and ADD another hard drive but I am not sure that is working.

Did you find a mouse driver that works?
I am also trying to get EMS too work but the space between 640K and 1M is full 128K for video???, Boot Rom 128K and some adapter stuff proabably used as a vm hard drive or something.

Thanks
Gordon

 

Gordon,

Thanks for the reply. Your solution makes sense, and I hadn't thought of that. I had assigned a second disk file, and DOS was just not seeing it.

However, your solution doesn't really give me what I want. I really want a second drive that is a separate file, as its purpose is to be able to back up files within the DOS application.

Sorry I can't help you with the mouse driver as what I'm doing doesn't absolutely require a mouse.

--JT

 

Hi,

Since this post is some months old, I would be interessed, if you found a solution for this problem.

I tried to do the same, but failed as you did...

Ciao

dirk

 

What does FDISK say about the second disk? Does it simply not give you the option to switch to it or how do you know that DOS cannot see the disk?

 

FDISK is not showing the point no 5, where you can switch drives...

Caio

dirk

 

Can you boot the same VM into Linux or Windows and check whether anybody can see the second hard disk at all?

 

I can see the Drive under a different VM, running Win XP.
On that particular VM, I only have MS-DOS 6.22 installed...

Ciao

dirk

 

Due to BIOS limitations you can't use drive connected to secondary IDE controller in systems. that do not provide own IDE driver. DOS is that system.

You can solve your problem with connecting second HDD to primary IDE controller as a slave device (IDE 0:1 in Parallels terms) and connect CD as a primary device on secondary IDE controller. That should help you.

 

Thanks.
At least I can see the 2nd HDD now at FDISK...

But after creating the Partition, FDISK is not able to reboot the VM.
If I do that manually, the new Partition (Drive D seems not to be a valid Partition to the system.
I cannot format it nor can I start FDISK again.
In both cases I get "Unzulässiger Datenträgertyp beim Lesen von Laufwerk D", which means, Type of Disk is not valid...

Ciao

dirk

 

Strange. I can't remember that fdisk reboot system. Here it says something like "You should reboot.. blah-blah" and quits to DOS.

May be you should reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Del ? Not hard reboot...

 

OK, I do not know, what I made different, but now it works...

Thanks


dirk