Please read the message regarding software licenses in Section 1.6 before you install or use MS-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS or any other DOS as a guest operating system in Bochs.
To access your CD-ROM in DOS, you must download an IDE CD-ROM driver. Bochs emulates a very generic CD-ROM 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 CD-ROM.
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]. 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:CD001If the files mentioned in config.sys and autoexec.bat are not in the root directory, give the full pathname, like c:\windows\himem.sys.
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).
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.
| [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. |