Mounting iso disk images on an OS/2 guest running on Virtual Box

After installing OS/2 Warp 4 I never did get round to installing the latest Fixpack15 or the updated gradd display driver. I’ve just been playing around with it this evening though and made some progress.

First, the version I installed had a default UK keyboard layout which got in the way of trying to type any path locations as I couldn’t find where the backslash was 🙂 I fixed this by editing config.sys and changing this line:

DEVINFO=KBD,UK166,C:\OS2\KEYBOARD.DCP

to this:

DEVINFO=KBD,US,C:\OS2\KEYBOARD.DCP

I then worked out a way of creating iso disk images of the files I wanted to transfer across, mount them as as CD image in VirtualBox, and then access the files from the OS/2 guest.

On my Mac, I used Disk Utility to create a new disk image with the following settings:

diskimage for os2

After creating the image it is automatically mounted in Finder. Once done, unmount it, and then from Terminal, convert it to a .iso with:

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o [filename].iso [filename].cdr

I got this from this post. I also found this works if you create the first disk image as a Mac DMG image too. I suspect you still need to create it with the correct CD size and FAT format though.

From this point I started working through the steps here, and got FP5 installed ok using the SimplyFix41 utility, and next I’m going to jump up to FP15 and also install the gradd display drivers. Also will be trying out the last version of Netscape for OS/2 and see if that works ok. Fun times!