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I am running VirtualBox (Version 5.0.20 r106931) on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014; 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7; 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3) with OS X El Capitan (10.11.4). I already installed Windows 95 following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7RwnrdC_k

While Windows 95 boots, it shows the Windows 95 logo but after some seconds it shows this error:

While initializing device IOS:

Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer.

I have edited the VirtualBox XML file for my guest Windows 95 machine. VirtualBox GUI for MacOS doesn't offer the option for disabling VT-x/AMD-V, so you edit the XML file directly with a text editor or you can use the command line interface 

$ VBoxManage modifyvm

The relevant tags for the XML file are the following:

<VirtualBox xmlns="http://www.innotek.de/VirtualBox-settings" version="1.15-macosx">
  <Machine uuid="{bba76ccc-e1ba-4251-af68-64484c9a8fc2}" name="Windows 95" OSType="Windows95" snapshotFolder="Snapshots" lastStateChange="2016-05-04T20:51:40Z">
    <Hardware version="2">
      <CPU count="1" hotplug="false">
        <HardwareVirtEx enabled="false"/>
        <HardwareVirtExNestedPaging enabled="false"/>
        <HardwareVirtExVPID enabled="false"/>
        <HardwareVirtExUX enabled="false"/>
        <PAE enabled="false"/>
        <LongMode enabled="false"/>
        <HardwareVirtExLargePages enabled="false"/>
        <HardwareVirtForce enabled="false"/>
      </CPU>

So, as long as I understand, having HardwareVirtEx as "false" means VT-x, AMD-V is disabled. I have read it would work if I disable VT-x/AMD-V. But it keeps failing to boot.

Questions:

  1. Any clue? What else should I try?
  2. Is it possible at all to run a guest Windows 95 on a VirtualBox on Mac OS X host?
  3. Has anybody been successful on this venture?
  4. Should I better go with a non-free virtualization solution like Parallels?

Thanks a lot,

/Gus

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1 Answer 1

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I found the way to make it. Windows 95 and 98 cannot run by processors faster than 2.1 GHz. My MacBook Pro's processor runs at 2.2 GHz. That was the reason for it to fail while booting. I found this patch and worked perfectly :)

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-limit-broken/

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  • How did you apply the patch? I've got exactly the same issue, and I tried those patches, but they all say they cannot be run in DOS mode. As I can't boot into Win95, I don't see how to apply them. I tried both FIX95CPU.EXE and VMM2XUPD.EXE
    – Avrohom Yisroel
    Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 0:02

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