Installing Be

1

I’ve been trying to install any flavor of BeOS now for a good while, not having any success.

With BeOS MAX 3 & BeOS 5 Developers Edidtion, I get stuck at the very first prompt in the installer, not being able to move the mouse or enter anything with the keyboard. I have ordinary PS/2 input. My MB is a ASUS P5AD2-E premium.

With Zeta 1.0, I get stuck before any prompt at all, it just hangs at boot-up.

With BeOS 5 PE, since I’m running Windows XP, I need to boot via a floppy, but no version has worked, and I’ve tried quite a few. It always hangs mid-boot.

The only thing I’ve got to work is a Haiku image via VMWare.

Does anyone have any idea how I might go about to install BeOS or Haiku?

2

out of curiousity, what type of hardware are you running? cpu, speed, ram, video card, and the chipset on your motherboard

as soon as the boot logo displays, press the spacebar. this’ll bring up the Boot Options Menu, where you can select some different safe-mode options. Do any of them help?

3

Im at school now, so I can’t test the safe mode yet, I’ll report back on that later.

My Motherboard is as stated an ASUS P5AD2-E premium.
CPU: Intel P4 3,4GHz
RAM: 1024 MB (too much…?)
GPU: ASUS Radeon X700

4

on BONE ( r5+bone, dano, zeta?, phos), 1024mb is too much. 768mb is the upper limit.
i’m not sure which version of zeta can boot on 1024mb ram.

on R5.0.x, 1024mb is generally ok.
note, some versions of DevEd come with bone pre-installed but deactivated. I’m not sure which group it falls into.

both of these upper limits can be even lower if you’re using a graphics card with gobs of memory.

you could try using a boot image from http://mmadia.zelect.org
for Max, 5.0.3+intel+idereplacement+512mb ram limiter, though i doubt it’ll help.

check out http://betips.net

5

Safe mode didn’t work, unfortunately.
Must be something with my motherboard, but I’m using regular PS/2 input so it really should work, shouldn’t it?

Also tried the boot image, it always say that it can’t find a BeOS image to boot from or some such… But I have installed PE5, I guess it should find it?

But maybe the mouse and keyboard would work in a fully installed envirorment, so is there a way I could just force an install onto a partition? Like you do with ghost images.

Or, is there anything you could do from a Haiku image run in VMWare? I can’t seem to mount anything, or browse the HD in any way…?

6
reallyjoel wrote:
Safe mode didn't work, unfortunately. Must be something with my motherboard, but I'm using regular PS/2 input so it really should work, shouldn't it?

Also tried the boot image, it always say that it can’t find a BeOS image to boot from or some such… But I have installed PE5, I guess it should find it?

But maybe the mouse and keyboard would work in a fully installed envirorment, so is there a way I could just force an install onto a partition? Like you do with ghost images.

Or, is there anything you could do from a Haiku image run in VMWare? I can’t seem to mount anything, or browse the HD in any way…?

I don’t think R5 PE can be loaded from NTFS anyway - only from a FAT partition… BeOS Max and Dev Edition are both R5 PE, but allow installation to a partition rather than an image.be file on your FAT partition.

7

I’ve made a new FAT32 partition where I installed BeOS 5 PE, and where I intend to install a “real” installation later on when I get it working.

But how do the boot disk find the image? Does it scan all drives or is there a reference in the boot image?

8

Try DevEd 2.2.

It’s in French, but it still could help. Make sure you use a RAM Limiter.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.deved2.com/&prev=/search%3Fq%3DBeOS%2BDevEd%2B2%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D

9
reallyjoel wrote:
I've made a new FAT32 partition where I installed BeOS 5 PE, and where I intend to install a "real" installation later on when I get it working.

But how do the boot disk find the image? Does it scan all drives or is there a reference in the boot image?

I’m not entirely sure how it knows where to find the image.be actually… good question.

I assume the "make boot disk" option in the start menu knows where the image is, and somehow tells the bootloader how to find it…

it will still need the ram limiter patch applied to the kernel in order to boot, and this will be a problem if the boot disk is custom-built for your specific path.

10

fwiw, i never tested or even considered using my boot images with PE’s image.be file. They were built and tested for booting from an actual partition or cd media.