Guest Additions won't install in Windows 98

Will Park picture Will Park · Sep 20, 2017 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I'm trying to set up file sharing between my Mac OS and Windows 98. I think the reason it's not working at the moment is that I haven't installed Guest Additions.

However, Guest Additions .iso is attached in Media Manager. It also looks fine in settings (see screengrabs, correct me if I'm wrong).

Settings:

Settings

In the virtual machine it doesn't automatically run, and if I try to manually run it nothing happens.

Bottom two .exe files don't run in W98, top .exe does nothing if you click on it:

Bottom two .exe files don't run in W98, top .exe does nothing if you click on it

Any ideas?

Answer

Andrew picture Andrew · Oct 11, 2017

VirtualBox Guest Additions don't exist for Windows 98.

VirtualBox Guest Additions work fine for Windows XP.

Modern Macs do not support SMB Network sharing with pre-XP operating systems like Windows 98 (my old Leopard machine did it fine, my new Mavericks machine won't do it at all), otherwise, you could switch on sharing with your Win98 virtual machine, and access files on there in OSX's Finder.

So what's the work around? Make a WinXP virtual machine. Either just use that instead, and use the Guest Additions to share files; Or use WinXP as a middleman - and network your Win98 VM with your WinXP VM, and copy your files from Win98 to WinXP and then to OSX. Most Win98 programs run fine in WinXP, so most people just use WinXP with Guest Additions, and leave it at that.