This How To article is in multiple parts:
Building the C drive within Virtual Box is a bit of a pain due to needing to have both the FreeDOS and SpinRite floppy images to create your C drive. I've built the Virtual Machine and Virtual disk file so you don't have to, and exported it as an appliance, which is a single OVA file.
Now return back to your instructions for your Host OS to learn how to map the drives on the host into VirtualBox:
- Introduction
- Using Windows to Go as the base OS for your bootable VirtualBox system
- Using Kubuntu Linux as the base OS for your bootable VirtualBox system
- Using MacOS as the base OS for your bootable VirtualBox system
- Downloading or Creating your VM and moving files in and out of the virtual drive
Using a Prebuilt Virtual Machine and C Drive DOS disk
Building the C drive within Virtual Box is a bit of a pain due to needing to have both the FreeDOS and SpinRite floppy images to create your C drive. I've built the Virtual Machine and Virtual disk file so you don't have to, and exported it as an appliance, which is a single OVA file.
How to use this:
- Download the
SRDOS.OVA
file to your boot drive from this link- This is coming from my OneDrive account, and it's all of about 1 MB!!
- From within VirtualBox, go to File | Import Appliance
- Point to the SRDOS.OVA and Import
- Should be at /home/kubuntu/Downloads
- The Virtual Machine and it's associated Virtual Hard Drive will be imported into your 'VirtualBox VMs' folder and ready to go, BUT see below to potentially convert the hard drive image (in .VMDK or .VDI form) into a more useful form (.VHD or .IMG)
What's in the "Appliance":
- A .VBOX file with a basic PC configuration:
- IDE controller (listed as PIIX4) with "boot C drive" attached as
IDE Primary Device 0
- Floppy controller
- AHCI controller
- IDE controller (listed as PIIX4) with "boot C drive" attached as
- The C drive file:
- Will be in .VDI or .VMDK file when imported
- 100 MB dynamically sized drive (so actually only takes up about 2 MB)
- MBR drive with one partition, formatted as FAT16
- GRC-modified FreeDOS installed
- The various disk prep utilities I noted in the detailed directions
- ReadSpeed (it's the rs.exe file in the /READSPEE directory)
- Not SpinRite!! SpinRite is a paid, licensed program and you need to get your own copy
- There is a spinrite.exe on the C drive but it's an old pre-release version that puts up a banner to buy your own copy
- Will be in .VDI or .VMDK file when imported
I bought my own copy of SpinRite, how do I get it on the C Drive?
Two ways:- Method One - create a floppy image and mount it - REQUIRES WINDOWS PREP PC
- On your Prep machine:
- Go to GRC.com and download your personal copy of SpinRite
- Run the SpinRite executable in Windows
- Use the option to "Create ISO or IMG file"
- Click on "Save a Boot Image File"
- Dialog box comes up; change the Save as type entry to: IMG (for making boot diskette)
- By default it's called SpinRite.img, change the name to SPINRITE-FD.img and save it
- Exit SpinRite
- Copy that file to a USB flash drive
- On your Target machine:
- Start your Win to Go, MacOS, or Linux boot drive on your target machine
- Insert the USB drive from the Prep PC
- Copy the SPINRITE-FD.img to your VirtualBox VMs folder
- In the Settings for your Virtual Machine, attach that floppy image to the floppy controller
- In the Settings, check the boot order, ensure that the Hard Drive has higher priority than the floppy controller
- Start your Virtual Machine
- You should boot to the C drive
- Delete dummy spinrite.exe from C drive
- Copy spinrite.exe from A drive to C drive
- shutdown
- In Settings, detach the floppy image
- On your Prep machine:
- Method Two- Hard drive conversion - convert the .VDI or .VMDK to a format that the host can access for read and write operations
- Overview
- Convert the hard drive to a format that's readable by the Host OS
- Mount the hard drive file in your host system
- Perform your file operations (i.e., copy the spinrite executable to the drive)
- Unmount the virtual hard drive
- How to do it:
- Go to GRC.com and download your SpinRite executable from either the new purchase page or upgrade page
- Will be SR61.EXE
- Follow the instructions in Part 5C of this How To, in order to mount the Virtual Drive in a way that your Host OS can see it:
- Part 5C - Copying files to and from the Virtual Hard Drive
- Obviously, copy the SR61.EXE file you downloaded to the Virtual Hard Drive while it's mounted to the Host OS.
- Go to GRC.com and download your SpinRite executable from either the new purchase page or upgrade page
- Overview
Now return back to your instructions for your Host OS to learn how to map the drives on the host into VirtualBox:
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