Bochs User Manual
<<< Previous | Guest operating systems | Next >>>

# DOS

You must read the message regarding software licenses in the Section called Third Party Software Licensing and Temporary Files in the Chapter called Introduction to Bochs before you install or use MS-DOS, OS/2, DR-DOS, or any other DOS as a guest operating system in Bochs.

## Accessing your CDROM

To access your CDROM in DOS, you must download an IDE CDROM driver. Bochs emulates a very generic CDROM drive, and several drivers are known to work. Others don't. This section describes how to set up your `config.sys` and `autoexec.bat` to enable the CDROM.

The drivers that have been reported to work are `OAKCDROM.SYS` that comes with several versions of Windows and `SBIDE.SYS` version 1.21 from Creative Labs[1] and OAKCDROM.SYS that comes with several versions of Windows. Copy the driver to your boot disk, and then set up the startup files as follows.

    config.sys:
      device=himem.sys
      device=oakcdrom.sys /D:CD001
          -or-
      device=sbide.sys /D:CD001 /P:1f0,14,3f6

    autoexec.bat:
      mscdex.exe /M:10 /D:CD001

If the files mentioned in `config.sys` and `autoexec.bat` are not in the root directory, give the full pathname, like `c:\windows\himem.sys`.

## SB16 driver for DOS

To use the SB16 device in DOS you need to load a driver for it. The file `SBBASIC.EXE` contains a self-extracting archive with all required file. After unpacking it to `C:\SB16` you can execute `INSTALL.EXE` to install the driver. The file `DISK.ID` should contain the version string `SDR-31STD-1-US (Revision 1)`.

## Bootdisks of early DOS versions

On the Web there are bootdisks available for most of the DOS versions ever released, but some of them have been reported to fail in Bochs. The bootdisk for MS-DOS 1.25 contains a boot sector of a newer DOS version, so it would fail on real hardware, too. The floppy image for MS-DOS 2.11 has a boot sector that tries to boot from hard disk instead of the floppy.

### Notes

[1] | To get it, go to Creative Labs web site, click on Support, then click Download Files. You get to a screen where you must select the operating system and the product for which you want the driver. Choose DOS as the operating system, and "CD-ROM: 4x and above" as the product. There are several choices, but you want `sbide121.exe` from April 15, 1997. Version 2.0 does not work. The download file is a self-extracting ZIP file, so on DOS or Windows you just run it; on other platforms you can try using the unzip command. The driver is called SBIDE.SYS.

<<< Previous | Home | Next >>>
GNU (Also known as GNU/Hurd) | Up | Windows 95