if you boot MS-DOS in DOSBox then you don't need to use CDROM drivers since you cannot use cd-roms in MS-DOS booted in DOSBox.

As for images in DOSBox, don't use bximage. Download HAL9000's build of DOSBox and create a DOSBox image with imgmake.

Unfortunately you can't mount CD images in DOSBox if you boot from a hard disk image file. There seems to be no interest in removing this limitation. If you're desperate, you may be able to put a CD image file inside of your HDD image file and use a DOS utility to mount it as a virtual CD-ROM, but that was too much of a pain for me to bother with.

The reason I was wanting to do that is because when I started Win98 setup from DOS mounted to A:, setup froze when checking my system. I have read that you will need to disable some things when starting setup because it will find fault in the system. Is this what's happening here? I assumed that I needed to boot into DOS from the HDD to install Win98 because setup froze when booting from A:.

I'll try what you suggested DosFreak. Thanks!

Windows 9x isn't supported in DOSBox so it will freeze,crash, or possibly blow up your computer.

If you want to install Windows 9x in DOSBox then you need to copy the installation files to the hard drive image.

That's what I figured. But like I said, I'm having trouble doing even that. Since I can't do this through DOS, does HAL9000's build let me do this? Because I tried some basic DOS commands in the DOSBox prompt and they weren't recognized.

Also, I used bximage from Bochs to create a 512MB HDD image. However, DOS 6 only sees the first 70MB as usable, and sees it as 100% of the disk. Is DOSBox, DOS, or bximage at fault here?

I think only images with 504 MB are supported atm, hal's build may allow more. See the harddisk image guide Sample usage of a harddisc image in DOSBOX
As for getting the setup files onto the image, either use the tool linked to in the guide, or imgmnt the image and copy via dosbox.

Thanks Dominus, will try those.

Let us know how it goes.

I downloaded H-A-L-9000's DOSBox MegaBuild 5 and tried to use imgmake. B: is my DOSBox directory. I typed "imgmake B:\HDD.IMG -t hd -size 128". I got a message saying the image was being created, then the following line said "Failed to open 'B:\HDD.IMG' for writing". I created a dummy image then did this again, but got the same result. I couldn't find anything on Google about it, and the default cylinder/head/etc. setting is fine for me. I even used the example command line and it still failed.

What is the real directory that B: is mounted to?

Also, what is your host OS?

B: is mounted to C:\DOSBOX. My OS is Windows XP Pro MCE SP3.

Shouldn't you be running imgmake from the Windows command prompt and not from within DOSBox?

As far as I know that's not a CMD command. I'm talking about within the DOSBox prompt.

I agree with Jorpho - I'm pretty sure I ran it from a Windows CMD prompt instead of from inside of DOSBox when I successfully used it.

The thing hal created should be available INSIDE dosbox, the bochs tool is a regular command line tool.

OT: I know that doesn't help right now, but you shouldn't mount anything to B: unless you really need to. You might run into problems with some games that expect strict order (A: 3.5" Floppy, B: 5.25" Floppy, C: hard drive, D: CD-Rom). Again, I really don't think that is the problem here, but you might run into this problem with some game in the future 😀

The imgmake command is available and can be used, but it encounters a file opening error, despite the fact that I followed the command syntax exactly. imgmake is not a part of CMD, as I type it in and got a message saying it isn't recognized. It isn't listed in the help list either.

And thanks for the tip Dominus, will fix that. 😀

You have to give imgmake a path+file on the host you can write to.

Thanks, I didn't realize at first what "host path" meant. I got the image made and copied D:\Win98 to C:, then ran setup. But I get the same result as before. Not a freeze, like I said, but I get stuck at the system check. I thought it froze before, but I was wrong. Setup won't do anything no matter what keys I press. I don't think setup is seeing the keyboard. How would I fix this?

While I'm at it, how would I go about formatting the HDD? I created a logical DOS partition within DOS, but the drive letters of the primary, extended, and logical partitions confuse me because the image is already mounted to C: in DOSBox. Is image mounting done by file or by partition? Need some clarification on that.