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Installing MS-DOS in Parallels
In the fun, but mostly useless, knowledge category, tonight I loaded MS-DOS 6.22 onto Parallels. I didn’t have a copy on CD, only floppies and I couldn’t get Parallels to see the USB floppy, but I was able to easily make floppy disk images of the originals and mount those. Here’s how:
- Plug in the USB floppy drive and load the floppy. You should be able to see all the files from the Mac Finder window.
- Start OS X’s Disk Utility application. Click on the floppy and then click “New Image” in the menu bar of Disk Utility.
- Select “Read/Write” for image format and no encryption.
- Type a name and then click save.
- Once the image is done, change the extension to “fdd”. I did this in Terminal so that I didn’t have to put up with Finder asking me insipid questions.
That’s it. Now you’ve got an image that you can mount from any Parallels instance. I created images of the four original MS DOS 6.22 install floppies and in a few minutes had a working instance of DOS. I even fired up BASIC and played with it a bit. I’d forgotten about “DoubleSpace” and other programs for making the computer usable. DoubleSpace seems downright laughable in this day with 200Gb drives in a laptop, but there was a time…
Posted by windley on January 2, 2007 8:29 PM
Comment from Luke at January 11, 2007 9:15 AM
Thanks for the note about your experience. I have a friend who owns a machine shop, and they still use DOS and Autocad 14 on their design machines. You verifying that DOS will in fact run in Parallels will give him hope of being able to migrate away from his DOS/Windows XP setup to an OSX/Parallels w/ DOS setup.
He might have some troubles ahead with the serial design tablets though.
Cheers
Comment from Gunnar at February 17, 2007 10:41 PM
If you don't want to deal with a floppy, or don't own one any more like me, MS-DOS 7.1 comes on CD and you can get it for free at:
http://www.syschat.com/download60.html
Comes with a renamed Norton Commander too and runs fine on my MacBook Pro and OS X 10.4.8
Comment from Tim Wheatley at October 8, 2007 3:32 PM
Did you guys get any recognised Extended Memory that actually works? DOS is consistently telling me it can't make it work and memmaker just freezes up.
Comment from Den Policarpio at November 18, 2007 7:20 PM
Hi! I'm trying to get MS-DOS on parallels to play some really old games published from Super Solvers such as Operation Neptune and Gizmos and Gadgets BUT I get errors stating that a VGA adapter needs to be installed... Have you encountered this issue? Thanks
- Den
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