Got Dos and Windows 95 installed in VMWare Fusion!

Well I finally made the time to install DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 on my new MacBook Pro under VMWare Fusion. VMWare is a virtual machine that allows you to run different, Guest, operating systems under the host operating system. So now I have Windows XP, Windows 95, DOS 6.22 and Open SUSE 64-bit Linux all under different Virtual Machines.

Why waste space on a perfectly good laptop for old Microsoft operating systems. For me it boils down to one thing: games! I still have a soft spot for all my old Dos and windows games. Most of them will not run in Windows XP, or it will run if I use DOSBox. So now I can run the game I want in the operating system it was designed for.

Dos was a bit of a challenge. The big problem is that notebooks today do not have a floppy drive and that is all that Dos comes on. I got on Amazon and ordered a Sony external floppy drive. The problem with that is that VMWare did not recognize the external drive so I needed to do something different.

I found the allbootdisks website and downloaded bootdisks for Dos and Windows 95. That allowed me to boot and fdisk the virtual hard drive. Then what I had to do was reboot the virtual dos and push fn key and f2 while it started up to get into bios so I could change the boot order to boot from CD first. The reason I did this was that now I had a hard drive set up but it was not formatted. But even then it would not recognize the external drive.

So what I did then was to copy all the files from all three DOS floppies onto one CD-RW then I was able to install dos.

Windows was easier as it came on a CD. The hardest part there was digging through all my old manuals to find the product key.

Now on to installing the games!

Updated: Sorry I didn't come back and update this sooner but I had to consider DOS and win95 a failure. The big issue was sound - there wasn't any. Even VMWare's support site had no sound drivers to solve the problem. But I was able to get MOOII (Masters of Orion II) running on XP so I did not consider it a complete bust (except for the fact that I am taking up half of my laptops resources for a game that needs, at best, an eighth). I still need to get 98 or ME going though because Carmeggdon (I and II) will not run in XP.