Load the floppy disk image containing the CD-ROM driver and copy the driver to the C: drive. Using file manager, note the absence of CD-ROM support.Įxit WfW, if you’re in it, back to the DOS prompt. Note that the display is standard VGA 640 x 480 and there isn’t any sound. Unless you have a working printer from the nineties, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find a WfW driver for your modern printer.Īfter WfW installs successfully, unload any floppy images, reboot and start WfW. When installing WfW in the VM, accept the defaults, but take note of the following:
You can download a zip file containing floppy disk images for WfW from here. When installing DOS in the VM, as I reside in Australia, I changed the country system setting from US to UK (there isn’t an Australia option) to ensure the date was in dd/mm/yy format. You can download a zip file containing floppy disk images for MS-DOS 6.22 from here. Why DOS and WfW? WfW was an application that ran over the top of DOS. In VirtualBox, create the VM that will house DOS and WfW. In addition, enter the CD ROM directory and create a floppy IMG image of the AOATAPI.SYS driver. Now, using a product such as ImgBurn, create a CD-ROM ISO image containing these directories. These are the directories you should end up with. These are the highest versions of those browsers made for WfW. Search for and download IE 5.01 and Netscape 4.08 executables and place them in their respective directories. Extract the files from the zip and place them together with the downloaded SVGA.EXE file into the SVGA folder.Ĭreate two other directories, IE and Netscape.
Under the heading Installing display drivers in this post, follow the steps to download the specified files. We’re going to add three more directories to this group to accommodate display drivers, IE and Netscape browsers.Ĭreate the directory SVGA in this group. You should be able to identify a group of five folders. It contains all of the patches we require.
Why do we have to interact with the VM this way? The reason is there are no VirtualBox guest additions pre-Windows 2000, so this is a way of moving software and patches between the host system and target VM.ĭownload Windows 311 VMware.zip from Tony’s VMware site. Once the CD-ROM is enabled in the VM, we’ll use the second image, a CD-ROM image, to deliver patches and software to WfW via the VirtualBox CD-ROM drive. This will enable us to transfer the driver from the host system to the target VM via the VirtualBox floppy drive. The first is a floppy disk image of the CD-ROM driver for MS-DOS.
In this step, we’re going to build two images. I’ve outlined nine steps to follow to construct a WfW VM with sound, super VGA display, local network and browser support. As I already had access to later versions of Windows in VMs, I used the technique described here to create floppy images. I thought ImgBurn would do the trick for me, but I couldn’t create a readable floppy image with it.
There’s a 2012 post here that covers the installation of WfW in VirtualBox in quite good detail. These should serve as signposts for those who also wish to embark on a similar journey on the road less travelled to a time when Windows was just an immature little child that often behaved badly! So detailed in this post are the steps I took to resurrect WfW in VirtualBox. Plus the allure of bringing WfW back to life again in all of its former glory was just too great to pass by. However, WfW is where my love affair with Windows first began. I intended to stop the Windows virtual machine (VM) challenge at Windows 95 and wasn’t planning on going back as far as WfW. Some familiarity with DOS is also assumed.Įdit (): According to this thread, the highest version of VirtualBox to still support WfW is VirtualBox 6.0.18. A working knowledge of VirtualBox is assumed.
This post will be of interest if you are considering revisiting MS-DOS 6.22, the last standalone version of Microsoft DOS, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (WfW), the first commercial version of Windows to gain any real traction.įor this post, I’m working with VirtualBox 5.2.12 under Windows 10 Home (build 1803).