FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium

Trying for the first time inside VirtualBox. The instructions for formatting the disk are confusing and not reflective of how it actually looks, so I don’t know if I am doing things right, but I am simply formatting the whole virtual box disk for BeOS. The installer sees that and lets me write to it, but when the machine reboots, I get the message in the title of this post. I assume it’s missing the MBR, but it’s not quite clear how to put that on there without tripping up the installer.

Okay — when you mention “formatting the whole virtual box disk for BeOS”, how are you doing this? The steps on BeOS are a bit different than Haiku, but you’ll want to start with Partition under the Setup menu and choose Intel (even if you’re on an Apple computer, as “Apple” refers to the Apple Partition Map (APM), which Intel Macs don’t use (though early/first ones were APM compatible and could start from these disks, but that’s another story). In the window that comes up, the easiest option is just to dedicate one volume to BeOS (you’ll see 4 available) and make that one volume for the Be filesystem or “BeOS”. Once that’s all done, you’ll then want to open Setup again, but this time, Initialize the new partition as a BeOS volume. And… once that’s done, install the system. From there, you’ll want to let the Be boot manager (bootman) guide you through setting up a boot menu for the disk. This should come up automatically when the copying process is done. Not sure if this helps or if you already tried all this, but I do hope it helps :smiley:

Beos and haiku need a bootmenu, you can use the one included the installer.

No, they don’t. You can boot without the menu, and DriveSetup installs the right code in the MBR if you create a partition table using it.

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Ah ok, i will take look at this