Physical floppy unusable if attached to slot 1 on DOS guest

[Raul Gutierrez]

I would like to use a bootable floppy image and the physical floppy in a DOS guest.

If I attach the image to slot 1 (B:) and the physical drive to slot 0 (A:) I can access both disks.

If I swap the slots, I boot from image disk and use it as A:, but if I type dir b: I still access to image disk, not the physical drive, its LED doesn't even light.

If I try to reproduce it on a Windows XP guest, it works OK, both disks (image and physical) can be accessed as drive A: or B:

Host is Windows XP SP3, I can't try VirtualBox on other OS.

[Raul Gutierrez]

VBox.log

[Raul Gutierrez]

It is working now in VirtualBox 3.1.8

It has been corrected or I did a mistake...

Can anybody close it, please?

[Raul Gutierrez]

No, stop!

I've been experimenting a little more and I've just noticed it depended on the DOS manufacturer and version of the bootable disk image. It worked with some versions, while it didn't with others.

For example, it works with MS 6.22 (which is what most people use) but it doesn't with DR DOS 3.41

But I wrote that DR DOS 3.41 image in a physical floppy, booted another physical machine using that floppy, and it allowed me to access the B: drive.

So, now I don't know if it is a VirtualBox defect, or if simply someone could say "DR DOS is not supported".

[Frank Mehnert]

I would say the latter.