Originally posted by Van Zan I'm trying to use VMWare to play an old dos game (Life and Death 2)...

*ack* Much like using a sledgehammer to drive in a nail.

... and I downloaded Dos 6.22. However I'm having trouble installing it as a guest os....basically I when I start with my floppy I keep getting "NTLDR not found"...

That would be part of the NT OS that it's trying to run...which tells me you might be a little lost on the general usage of WmWare.

If Virtual PC is better I'll use that....

Not really.

You're best bet would be to use DosBox. Note that DosBox presumes you understand the basics of running DOS, (how to change directories, how to edit batch files or configuration files, etc...). If you don't, you might want to learn if you're going to use it.

Also, be sure and read the README file that is installed with it.

BTW, DOSBox does (should) run Life & Death 2, and the Realsound PC-speaker audio will even be output through your sound card! 😀

Thanks guys I'll try DosBox....btw i'm not quite the dummy I probably sound from my post 😀

I do know the basic Dos commands, I just never tried installing it before!

Would you mind telling me what I'm doing wrong with VMWare? (i'll never get better unless I learn)...I selected an "MS-DOS" os when the Virtual Machine Wizard so i cant understand why its looking for NTLDr of WinNT...so it must be the dos 6.22 disks right?

Cheers

I've never used VMWare or VirtualPC before so I don't really know. That certainly doesn't make sense that it would be looking for NTLDR. Weird, weird, weird.

Don't even bother with VMWare. Just get DOSBox. 😀

Van Zan wrote:

Would you mind telling me what I'm doing wrong with VMWare? (i'll never get better unless I learn)...I selected an "MS-DOS" os when the Virtual Machine Wizard so i cant understand why its looking for NTLDr of WinNT...so it must be the dos 6.22 disks right?

Actually, when you tell VMWare that you're going to use MS-DOS on that virtual machine, you are just setting some options for the VM to work correctly. You still need a bootable floppy or HD partition with MS-DOS installed on it for booting the VM. If it is a floppy, it means a bootable floppy created on a machine with MS-DOS or the original setup disks for the full version of MS-DOS.
The error message about NTLDR suggests that you are trying to boot with a floppy that was formatted in a NT/2000/XP machine, since the boot sector created by these operating systems will look for NTLDR. If the floppy was formated by MS-DOS the boot sector would look for IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS and would print the familiar "Non system disk or disk error" message.

You did not mention from where you downloaded MS-DOS 6.22, but this could mean that you've got a damaged image file or that you simply put the files on an NT/2000/XP formatted floppy. I don't want to post addresses of sites that offer MS-DOS image files for download, because I believe this is illegal (despite the comments about MS-DOS becoming abandonware). If you want to go ahead and learn something more with VMWare, you can try FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org). Download the image file for the 1.44 install disk and use Rawrite to dump the image on a floppy, then tell VMWare to use this floppy for booting.

Regards,

Originally posted by MajorGrubert

You did not mention from where you downloaded MS-DOS 6.22, but this could mean that you simply put the files on an NT/2000/XP formatted floppy.

Thats exactly what I did...I formatted the floppy in Win2k. I'll give FreeDos a try since DosBox had problems.

Btw I downloaded Dos 6.22 as three separate zip files, what is the right way to go about putting them on floppy? If I format them in MS-Dos will that fix it?

Thanks!

Originally posted by Van Zan Thats exactly what I did...

Then that's what's wrong. You have an NT floppy with DOS6 files on it, you can't mix them up like that. A DOS 6 boot disk would only use DOS6 OS files. An NT boot disk will want NT files...etc...

I'll give FreeDos a try since DosBox had problems.

? You're saying it wouldn't run on DosBox?

Btw I downloaded Dos 6.22 as three separate zip files, what is the right way to go about putting them on floppy? If I format them in MS-Dos will that fix it?

If you format that disk with DOS6, yes. The best way of doing it is to grab a pre-made DOS6 bootdisk from [url]http://www.bootdisk.com,[/url] insert a blank disk, and it will create a DOS6 bootdisk for you. You would then use the bootdisk to partition and format the virtual hard drive within VMWare. You would then copy the files for the DOS6 OS in whatever method is easiest for you (in this case, that would probably involve copying the files to floppies, then back to VMWare's virtual hard drive).

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

You're saying it wouldn't run on DosBox?[/b]

Thanks Nicht Sehr....Life and Death 2 installed ok with DosBox but when playing it I continually get a prompt looking for "Game Disk #6" and its appearance frequency increases when in an op.

Also when I went back to play it again it wouldnt start - "config error hardware has changed" .Which basically means each time I want to play it I have to install it from scratch.

None of which happened when I got it working with a bootdisk on my old NT machine.....

Thanks again....

I've had it complain about changed configurations when installing it through NTVDM and then running it through DOSBox, but if you've managed to install it in DOSBox I'm not sure what would change unless you've been messing with your settings.