I cannot install BeOS 5 PE MAX nor 4.5.2 in my PC. It’s an Intel Pentium4 with 4GB RAM PC and booting from BeOS CD, installation process hangs and resets the computer before the ray symbol, that is, only the first two symbols are illuminated.
Any idea about what can be wrong?
Thank you!
BeOS had a strict memory-limit.
I believe it’s 1GB including everything (RAM, GPU, etc.)
You can test it by downgrading to 512MB.
Thank you, I’ll try. In fact my BIOS has the option to “reduce” the RAM amount to only 256MB that I already used to install IBM DOS and OS/2 in the same HDD.
I got it, I got it ! With 256MB RAM Beos has been correctly instaled and preserved the System Commander boot manager.
The problem now is that it stops booting when the symbol of the computer is iiluminated below the BeOS 5 title. I waited for 15 minutes and nothing happens. What can I do? Is there something that can I fix ?
Try disabling some options in the BeOS boot menu, hold shift or space as soon as the Be loading screen appears.
Try to enable safe mode first, then without safe mode enabled, disable options independantly (like call the bios, smp, can’t remember the other ones…)
You’ll still need to limit the ram on your machine unless you find a patched bootdisk to overcomz the 512MB limit.
Thank you for your advise. By setting some paramters I realized that Beos 4.5.2 (and 5.0.3 PE and 5.0.3 Pro and 5.0.3 PE MAX) do not likes my IDE drive and it fails to boot even if the OS was correctly installed 
I replaced the IDE HDD by a SATA one and then all the BeOS versions were properly installed and running. The problem is that OS/2 don’t like the SATA drive and refusses to be installed. As I want to have a retro-computer with some old OSs with System Commander I’ll try Haiku instead of Beos and I cross my fingers…
What’s your motherboard?
It’s a Dell Optiplex GX520 computer…
Anyway, I downloaded the Haiku ISO and I’m trying to install it but, System Commander 5 needs a bootable floppy to install any OS. I have seen inside the Haiku ISO and it seems that there’s a 2.88MB floppy image instead of an 1.44MB one.
Resuming: Is it possible to boot from an 1.44MB flopppy to install Haiku in the same way that Beos 5 does?
There is an IDE replacement driver/bootdisk for BeOS 5, it might be worth a try, or BeOS 5.1 may work directly.
Booting Haiku from floppy, that’s a good question I’ll let other people answer it.
Finally the three operating systems are installed and selectable from System Manager. This has been done by creating the partitions using XFdisk, formatting them according to the OS to be installed (FAT16, HPFS and FAT32) and making only one visible at a time. Then, I installed the three operating systems one by one and finally installed System Manager to switch between them at the startup.
So, I now have IBM DOS, OS/2 and Haiku. I’ll start to enjoy Haiku that’s new for me 