If you know nothing about VirtualBox, now would be a good time to learn. Thanks to VirtualBox, you can relive that nightmare all over again! Windows 3.1x was nothing more than a graphical shell around which DOS operated. Hence, to get files in and out of a Win 98 VM, you can go via a the network or via a USB stick.For many of us, this was our first experience with the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface (GUI). Then, if I ejected it from the Win 98 box (left click on green USB eject arrow on bottom right of Win 98 screen and eject the relevant drive), and then deselected it from the VirtualBox ‘Devices’ menu, I could mount it on my Linux desktop and see the files I had copied out of the Win 98 VM. When I rebooted lots of ‘ghost’ drives seemed to appear in Windows Explorer, but when I put a USB stick into the host and made sure it was activated in the ‘Devices’ -> ‘USB Devices’ menu on the top of the VM window, I could indeed see the USB stick inside the VM. Also, on rebooting I did not let Windows try to install/find any new devices I just cancelled any dialogues it popped up.

If using First Edition, the USB driver install is a little different). How about allowing the VM to access a USB stick? I started by finding ‘nusb36e.exe’ or similar on some trustworthy website, and installed it on the Win98 guest (ah, but how did I get the file into it? Well, I could have browsed the web from inside the VM, but I just used the genisoimage trick noted above), noting the instructions about removing previously defined USB devices (and other unidentified devices) first, by opening Device Manager in Win98 (note I am using Win98 SE. However, it is no good for getting stuff out again, since the iso is read-only. Hence, I can just put the files I want to get into Win 98 in a directory and use genisoimage to make an iso file of the directory then put the iso in VirtualBox’s virtual CD drive using the ‘Devices’ menu (usually at the top of the VM). Where the directory cd_dir will become the root directory To create a vanilla ISO9660 filesystem image in the file cd.iso, At a command prompt on a Linux host, typing man genisoimage

One of the simplest is to use genisoimage. But there are various tricks to try. Using network connectivity is one way. To get stuff into a Win98 virtual machine running in VirtualBox on a Linux host, VirtualBox shared folders are (as I understand it) not an option because there are no ‘Guest Additions’ for Win98.

Virtualbox windows 98 guest additions