FAT16 drive on SD card with oracle virtual box? and then use the SD card on real retro hardware? \ VOGONS

FAT16 drive on SD card with oracle virtual box? and then use the SD card on real retro hardware?

Topic actions

First post, by Imito

Imito Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 32
Joined: 2023-10-05, 19:37

Is it possible to create a FAT16 hard drive on an SD card using oracle virtual box? and then use the SD on real hardware with a Sintechi IDE adapter?

i installed oracle virtual box 7.2 and installed DOS 6.22 using virtual box.
then i have a microSD card of 8GB
I tried to make virtualbox detect the sd card, adding the usb sd card reader in settings, in order to use it as a secondary hard drive in virtualbox , but i was unable to make it work, never gets detected in DOS.

the idea was to have an SD card prepared using VM, and then i just transfer the SD card to the real retro PC using one of those Sintechi IDE adapters, but i failed.

the only way to install DOS properly on an SD card is by attaching the Sintechi IDE adapter to the real machine? and boot DOS using real floppy discs?

Reply 1 of 1, by wierd_w

Posted on Today, 18:48

wierd_w Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 1615
Joined: 2023-07-14, 06:20

It's possible 'to an extent'.

You can make a .vmdk that points at a physical block device, then tell virtualbox to treat that as the hard disk of the vm. This is not a normal configuration, and the instructions to do it are not user friendly, but it's doable.

https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-ph … -in-virtual-box

There will be problems if the vintage machine does not speak LBA, however.

Virtualbox will present it as LBA, unless the .vmdk file says to present it as CHS.

If your vintage machine only speaks CHS, you need to detect the drive on the vintage machine, WRITE DOWN what the vintage machine's CHS reported geometry is, then make the raw device .vmdk file match.

(Useful reference)
https://www.forensicxlab.com/blog/vmdk

You'll need to make sure the .vmdk descriptor file uses the same geometry as that reported by your vintage machine's bios. The above reference will help immeasurably.

Virtualbox 'should' (in a perfect world) then create correct partitions using emulated dos fdisk and company.

Go to top of page Go to top of page

Back to General Old Hardware