Once you have gone through the first post which explained how to install MS-DOS in a virtual machine, you should immediately see the processor of the VM spike up and stay at 100% usage all the time. At this moment the ESX also is suffering from MS-DOS being unable to idle its CPU activity.
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Processor activity for a MS-DOS virtual machine just after installation |
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ESX processor being overloaded by the MS-DOS virtual machine |
The solution to this evident incompatibility resides in a small file named dosidle.exe. This file can be easily found on the Internet. Once you have it, use WinImage to make a flp disk image and inject this file in it. The others file are unnecessary so don't copy them. Mount the flp image and copy the executable to the C: drive with the following command (it's case insensitive, as it always was in Microsoft world):
COPY A:\DOSIDLE.EXE C:
Then edit the autoexec.bat and add this line at the end of it:
C:\DOSIDLE.EXE
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Dosidle.exe configuration and initialization |
Reboot the VM or just run C:\DOSIDLE.EXE. You will see the CPU usage dramatically dropping.
No further action is required to solve this issue.
I hope this post helped. Stay tuned for more about running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine.
Thank YOU very much! IMG files are the same as FLP, just rename them and You don't need to have troubles with "converting" them ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this information!
ReplyDeleteCarlo