Hello, I have Mint 17 Raphael with VBox 5.0 installed. In order to install Win98 in VBox I need to make a virtual floppy that is bootable. Here's what I have found and tried:

I make a folder called floppy in my home folder.
Then in the terminal:
that Puts a hard drive icon on the folder named floppy and a 1.5 MB Volume on my desktop. I also have on my desktop a folder named 98BOOT that contains all the files from a Win98 boot floppy. I can copy all those files and paste them into the 1.5 MB Volume. Unmount the Volume, start VBox, add floppy.img to Controller: Floppy. The Win98.vdi file is . At boot time the message is "This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and press any key.........". I have worked on this for many hours and have come to the end of my ingenuity lol. I got lost in the man pages, searched the web and tried dd, cat, cp and other ideas as well. I just need pointed in the right direction, I think,,,,So maybe someone might know how to boot in VBox to start the win98 install with no physical floppy and I will also need to make iso's of win 3.11 floppies because my 98 is an Upgrade version. Also I have tried booting with the volume mounted. Thanks

You are trying to boot an image with no boot code on it - think of it as your Mint system without grub in the MBR. The machine wouldn't boot.
Do you have the original floppy ?. And a drive ?. If so (under Linux) just dd the floppy to the image file - it should be bootable immediately.
Otherwise you'll have to embed boot code - used to be you would use the "sys" command under MS-DOS; don't know how you'd do it from Linux.

OK by using DD to copy the disk it gets the boot sector too. That's what I missed. I do have the floppy but the drive is in a machine that won't install any Linux OS I can use otherwise I would have dd'd the disk into the 1.5 volume. If I could make an image of that floppy in win98, I could transfer it to my Linux box but I find no dos commands to do that.

If it's that important to you, pull the drive out and stick it in a Linux machine. I keep an old floppy and cable in a cupboard. Haven't needed it for years, but I did to look at some OS/2 boot disks a while back.

I have not played with any of these but this should get you going.

http://www.allbootdisks.com

DOS6.22_bootdisk.iso there.

OK, syg00. The boot part was the problem. I finally got linux to recognize the floppy disk (I don't know how for sure; I think it was the manual entry in fstab '/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0.
then put the flash drive in my machine with Mint 17, started VBox, added new floppy drive pointed to the file on the flash drive. Started the win98 virtual machine and it did boot up with the options to start with CD support. So that is done and thank you all for participating.

Good job and well done!

Thanks