captainsubtle

I don't want to read anything, please just summarise the required steps

I'm trying to get DOS 6 installed on a VirtualBox VM. "Why?" is for another day, but there it is and I'm working with the downloadable MS DOS 6.0 from technet as I can't find a real floppy with it on. That the software is still available from Microsoft is great, sadly it doesn't come as a bootable image or ISO, it's just a self-extracting archive with the disk contents. Crap.

Virtual Floppy Drives

Some clever bugger has created a Virtual Floppy Drive device which would be fine if I wasn't trying to install on 64-bit. At time of writing there' a rather annoying issue with the current release: it's only build for 32-bit.

Trying to run the latest version of vfdwin.exe on my machine gives the following:

Fortunately for us, some other clever sod has rebuilt the needed bits to be x64 happy and you can download vfd_x64.zip from levicki.net. Extract and replace the two files in the corresponding release of VFD (2.1.2008.206 at time of writing) with the ones you just downloaded.

Now you can run vfdwin.exe by right clicking and hitting Run as administrator whereupon you'll be confronted with a nice tabbed dialog. Time to install the driver.

Unsigned drivers

Fucksticks. The driver is installable, but it refuses to run giving a "failed to start" message. Checking the Event viewer (google that if you don't know what it is) tells me that it's down to it being unsigned. There's a lot of posts on the internet saying "reboot, hit F8 and select the option that disables driver signing enforcement crap" but I really am not doing that ever time I want to use this, so I'm trying a Digital Signature Enforcement Overrider (DSEO) tool from NGOHQ that includes a "Sign my system file" function.

Using the DSEO tool:

First run as admin, enable test mode. For those of you who care, I think it's just adding a flag to the boot options. Reboot. This gave me a nice little testing mode overlay by the systray:

Second, I've fired it up, again right clicking and running as administrator, used the Sign a System File option and it's told me to reboot. Again. *Sigh*. Save this document, *reboot*.

Start vfdwin.exe as administrator again, in the driver tab hit Install then Start.

It started! Cor!

Creating the virtual drive

Still in the VFD Control Panel go to the Drive 0 (or 1 if you're odd) tab and open/create your new drive. You shouldn't need help from here.

Summary

That seriously wasn't worth the effort. I now have to run my Windows in Test Mode, which admittedly is nice that it happens automatically rather than stabbing F8 every time I restart but it's still not really a 'solution' in my book. What am I going to do? I'm going to install an XP virtual machine and use that for creating floppy images instead.

What a waste of time.

TL;DR

1. Download the latest release of Virtual Floppy Drive
2. Extract it
3. Download vfd_x64.zip from levicki.net
4. Extract it and replace vfd.sys and vfd.dll in the previous release with the new shiney ones
5. Download Digital Signature Enforcement Overrider
6. Run it as adminstrator, enable test mode
7. Reboot
8. Run the tool again, sign a system file and point it at vfd.sys in your VDF extract/replaced directory
9. Reboot
10. Right click vfdwin.exe and Run as administrator, install and start in the driver tab
11. Go to the Drive0 tab and create your drive