Re: Virtual PC using WinXP for Win98SE - help

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance


"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:%23r3%234wtTKHA.5052@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Bill Blanton wrote:
"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23uvfGreTKHA.4020@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Bill Blanton wrote:

After inserting the CD and doing a CD(menu) > "Use physical drive X:",
(or right click the CD icon at the bottom), you may need to reboot.

If you're not fast, and the virtual machine already booted, you would have
to reboot the VM (Action > Reset) w/the CD already captured, so >>> that the machine can recognize it as the boot device. Just
like
real machine would work in such a situation.

==== summary:

The only problem remaining is (in addition to not having a bootable Windows
CD for trying those out, if I wanted), is this (for running DOS in VPC):

I can't even use VPC to run a DOS VM, because *within VPC*, and booting up
under DOS on my dos floppy disk in there, the CD drive is NOT even
recognized, even using the good ole, GCDROM.SYS driver, which otherwise works fine for DOS (outside of running VPC)! In other
words - and I don't understand this - if I boot up on my "flash DOS
drive" (with gcdrom in its config.sys), I have access to the CD, and its
fully recognized. BUT when booting up in DOS on the floppy *within VPC*, I don't have access.
The CD driver isn't recognized within VPC! The message displayed there is: "Driver name is MSCD000. No CD-ROM drive
to use. GCDROM not loaded! And then, "No valid CD ROM device drivers
selected". AND YET it works perfectly fine on my bootable DOS flash >> drive (using the same config.sys, etc, files) outside
of VPC.

Bill, You need to boot with a "generic" boot floppy, and *not* the one that
uses GCDROM.sys. Use the image that I provided in my previous post
http://home.earthlink.net/~bblanton2/98DOSBoot.vfd
or get a genenic boot floppy from bootdisk.com. That should work to get you access to your CDROM. The virtual machine does not
recognize the virtual CD as one needing that (gcdrom) driver.

OK, thanks Bill. All systems are "go" now, now that I've used the bootdisk image. And after "a bit of work", I finally figured
out how to get the fshare and mouse in there, too, and make a new ".vfd" floppy image file, to use for its bootup. It's so much
nicer and faster using that image file rather than using a real floppy. :-)

It is. I hardly ever boot from a physical floppy any more. Over the years
I've converted most of my boot floppys and CDs (various disk tools) to
virtual image format. It's also convienent to keep a blank formatted vfd
on file, for times when you need to create a new floppy.


It seems VPC's virtual disk wants to use a virtual "C:" as its default drive, but I suppose that is changeable. But I guess
that's ok, as long as I keep it straight (that the virtual C: drive has NOTHING to do with my real C: drive! But maybe it's
gnerally better leaving it that way, as C: is the normal default drive, for any op system :-)

Right. Drives in the VM have nothing to do with drives on the physical machine.
The whole of a virtual HDD is kept within one file on the host. That's one
of the biggest benefits of virtualization. You can do what you like to the
guest without worrying about the host being affected.


I'm just using VPC2004 for DOS (Win98's version of DOS) right now. And that may be all I want or need for now. At least I got
it running ok.

One thing I did notice is that when VPC is running, it does tend to slow things down a bit in accessing stuff outside of VPC.
But I don't think it's a RAM problem, though, since VPC2004 is apparently only using about 30 MB of RAM, last time I checked, so I
think it's just a shared CPU resource issue. (I'm only using a 1.6 GHz WinXP system, with 1 GB of RAM).

That is somewhat on the low side. You probably know this already, but
you can adjust how much RAM is allocated to each VM, in the "settings"
of each machine.


Thanks for the help! I was ready to throw in the towel, but I must say this has been an interesting experience. The Virtual PC
thing is really pretty fascinating to explore and use.

You're welcome, Bill. Welcome to the virtual side ;-)





.

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