This is to my knowledge the version of MS/PC-DOS that is the most difficult to install, let alone use... The setup seems to be FUBAR and all my attempts to complete it have failed miserably.

A number of issues will occur during the setup (separately as well as in various combinations), the most common being:
-Setup freezes when formatting hard drive
-Setup doesn't detect the requested floppies when they're inserted
-Setup freezes at boot
-Setup frezes at random occasions

In case I did manage to install it (though the installation was very crippled), I encounter additional problems, such as:
-DOS freezes at boot
-CONFIG.SYS error
-Other miscellaneous errors

Of course I tried various hypervisors, including Virtual PC, VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation - all failed. I also tried various versions of this release, and it seems some OEM versions are a bit better, but still not good enough to install properly.

This now presents a serious question: will MS/PC-DOS 4.0 ever work as MS/IBM intended?

for me, the Retail versions of MS-DOS 4.01 and PC-DOS 4.00 work fine without any problems.

DOS 4 is one of the operating systems known to fail on Virtual PC. If you say you tried everything (I'm assuming that includes Qemu and Bochs) - does it work on a real PC?

for me it works by disabling the IDE bus master in the BIOS settings of Virtual PC 2004/2007

try Virtual box or VMWARE

Yeah for me too.

Done that, still hangs after the restart to partition the drive. And it has that annoying habbit of not recognizing the inserted floppy disk...

I don't know then, for me it works fine.

Yeah, it's works fine for me too.

Do you load SHARE.EXE.

In DOS 4, some of the system calls pass through share.exe.

Try disabling or enabling hardware virtualization.

How do I do that?



Tried, unrecoverable setup error occurs when trying to format disk...

Besides, it asks for some disks (such as "SELECT COPY") that aren't even provided, at least to my knowledge...

You must use empty floppy. SELECY COPY is a blank floppy that you need to put in when it asks for it. It copies setup to it.

Oh, silly me.

No problem

I wonder if SETUP even tells you that or I just didn't read the instructions...

It tells.... But nevermind u know now

Well, I actually managed to install this version for once... Thanks for all the answers.

No problem So now u can install it correctly right?

Yes, I disabled IDE Bus Master and HAV and prepared an empty disk and voila! It did freeze on first boot though, but after that it worked fine.

Congratulations!

This goes for MS-DOS 4.01, I'll try PC-DOS 4.0 later today...

it also applies to it

Yeah. It aplies to all DOS versions 4.x