Hello everyone. I apologize profusely. I tend to consider myself fairly well versed in all flavor of DOSBox for the past few years, and I'm embarrassed to come asking a very rudimentary question. I promise I have thoroughly tried to find the answer on my own and I'm coming up short.

SHORT VERSION
I am unable to mount, much less boot ANY hard drive image in DOSBox Staging. I assumed it might be the geometry, but I'm truly flummoxed at this point.

LONG VERSION
I have a 1024 MB .VHD image with Windows 95 loaded. I've used it successfully for some time in PCem, 86Box, and my own custom 86Box build. While troubleshooting my issue, I also tried to load it in DOSBox-X and it works perfectly.

When I tried to load and boot in Staging it claimed to load the image in 2 fine, but couldn't boot. I tried booting into a floppy image (on 0), but could not find C. I tried FDISK (after making a copy of the VHD file) and it would not work (more specifics below). I thought it might possibly be an issue of the wrong geometry, or that Staging couldn't handle large drives, or a larger number of cylinders.

I created several new images in 86Box, DOSBox-X's IMGMAKE, and Bochs. All of them could be partitioned, formatted, read and booted from in other machines, but not staging. I tried creating static sized. IMG files with the same results.

1. For any drive larger than 512MB. FDisk from floppy could see the partition, but only recognized it as 16Mb. I could partition, format /s, and read from the drive on that session, but as soon as I rebooted it could no longer find C until I FDISK/FORMATTED again.

2. For any drive smaller than 512. Booting from A and running FDISK said no physical drive was attached whatsoever.

Here are the most recent .conf settings, although I have tried many many variations.

1imgmount 0 "Windows95b.img" -t floppy -fs none
2imgmount 2 "Windows 95 - Copy.vhd" -size 512,63,16,2080 -t hdd -fs none
3#imgmount 2 "small.vhd" -size 512,63,255,522 -t hdd -fs none
4boot a:

I wish this were a more nuanced question but... How can I mount and boot ANY drive into staging? I've included a link with
a) my Windows 95 hdd image
b) a small unformulated image
c) my .conf file
d) a Win95b Boot Disk image

REMOVED

If anyone could show me where my .conf is wrong, create an image that will boot in staging, or just point me in the right direction for this very dumb question, I'd be very very grateful.