$ guestmount -a freedos.img -m /dev/sda1 /tmp/freedosĪfter that, I can access my FreeDOS files via the /tmp/freedos directory, using normal tools on Linux. Putting that all together, I use this set of commands to access my FreeDOS virtual disk image from Linux: $ mkdir /tmp/freedos You only need the mount point while you're accessing the virtual disk. I'll usually create a temporary directory to work with. By default, FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 creates one partition on an empty drive, so access that partition as /dev/sda1.Īnd mountpoint is the location to 'mount' the DOS filesystem on your local Linux system. You would access the first partition as /dev/sda1, the second partition as /dev/sda2, and so on. Imagine using this virtual disk as a real hard drive. The device option indicates the partition on the virtual disk.

The g uestmount program can read this disk image format, as well as the QCOW2 image format used by GNOME Boxes, or the VDI image format used in VirtualBox.

On my system, I created my QEMU virtual disk image with the qemu-img command. In this usage, image is the virtual disk image to use. The basic usage of guestmount is: $ guestmount -a image -m device mountpoint Using guestmount is not as easy as double-clicking the file from the GNOME file manager, but the command line isn't too difficult to use. You can install libguestfs-tools using this command on Fedora: $ yum install libguestfs-tools libguestfs The guestmount program from the libguestfs-tools package lets you access or mount the virtual disk image from Linux. Fortunately, there's an easier way to do it. This was always error-prone and not very flexible. I used to access my virtual disk image by calculating the offset to the first DOS partition, then calling the Linux mount command with the right mix of options to match that offset. I teach a Management Information Systems (MIS) class where I talk about the history of computing, and I'll sometimes record a demonstration using FreeDOS and a legacy DOS application, such as As-Easy-As (my favorite DOS spreadsheet-once released as 'shareware' but now available for free from TRIUS, Inc).īut using FreeDOS this way means I need to transfer files between my FreeDOS virtual machine and my Linux desktop system.

I like to play classic DOS games, and sometimes I'll bring up a favorite DOS application.

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Transfer file to vm virtualbox