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biowizard
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Fusion Pro 13 and Workstation Pro 17 - Can they still run MS-DOS VMs?

I am running an essential legacy DOS VM both in Fusion 12 and in Workstation 16; these are critical to one of my long-term workflows.

Before I try upgrading to versions 13 and 17 respectively, does anyone know whether these VMs will still work?

Brian

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biowizard
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Happy to report that Workstation Pro 17 is running all of my VMs perfectly. Thanks for the help and advice!

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RDPetruska
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This has two answers...

So, I just loaded one of my DOS VMs on my personal laptop running Workstation 17.0.  It does load and run and appears to work correctly.

However, if you need to mount the DOS FAT-formatted virtual disk to your host PC to copy files to/from it, that functionality no longer works.  The last version which worked correctly is Workstation 16.1.2.

So, it depends on how you use your DOS VMs.  For my work laptop, I have stuck with 16.1.2.

biowizard
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Thank you very much for that response. Yes, I do rely on connecting my DOS VM (actually DOS 8, the non-Windows part of Windows 98SE) to a separate FAT32 formatted virtual disk which is shared with a Windows 7 VM; it's my long-winded way of getting files in and out of the DOS world!

If this will no longer work with Workstation Pro 17, I'd better stop upgrading right here!

Brian

EDIT: Just re-reading your response, and my message above, maybe I've misunderstood something. I don't every try to mount my VM MS-DOS "C:" drive in another VM, but what I do do, is have a separate FAT32 drive, which appears as "D:" in my MS-DOS VM, and as "E:" in my various Windows VMs. I can't run any two versions of Windows at once, nor Windows and MS-DOS simultaneously, because of the potential for double-updates and other sharing conflicts on this additional virtual drive, but what I can do is copy files to and from it in either DOS or Windows, then shut down, and run the other OS, to retrieve the files. It might be a bit long-winded, but I only typically have to do this once per week or so. So supplementary question: do you know whether this method of exchanging files between MS-DOS and the outside world, might still work?

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RDPetruska
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If you just attach that virtual disk to a different virtual machine to transfer files, that will still work.  And drag/drop still works using the VMware Tools for the newer OS's.  Just doesn't exist for DOS.

Also, not sure about you but I almost never upgrade the virtual hardware in my older VMs.  Most of my DOS and WinXP VMs are at Workstation 10.x compatibility.

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biowizard
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Thank you so much for the clarification.

Based on that, I think I will pony up for the upgrade. It will be good to be able to run Windows 11 in a VM, including (potentially) on my newer M1 MacBook Pro - even if the latter machine will most certainly NOT run MS-DOS! 🙂

Best, Brian

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RDPetruska
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I never thought about jumping through that many hoops, but I see that *could* work.  I may have to re-evalutate my workflow now.  Just always used the built-in disk mounting functionality to move many/large files to/from my DOS 6.22 VMs.  I could attach the disk to one of my Windows XP VMs, which I can copy/paste files and folders to/from.  It's just several extra steps that way - and quite a pain; but it could work.

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biowizard
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I guess I just came across my method by trial and error, some 8-9 years ago, after getting my first Mac, setting up Fusion, and then wondering how to get files in and out of my DOS VM. One of my first ever posts on this community was to ask for help and advice for how to connect the DOS VM to the outside world!

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biowizard
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Happy to report that Workstation Pro 17 is running all of my VMs perfectly. Thanks for the help and advice!

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