so, i inherited a laptop (hp omnibook xe3) with win98. i installed beos r5 pro from cd, using partition magic to chop the 8 gb drive to 6.5 for windows/1.5 for beos. long story short, the laptop is not well supported (no graphics driver, no sound driver, no network driver, etc) and now i’m trying to remove the beos partition to free up hard drive space, as the os is not very useful on this particular machine.
i ran the “remove beos partition” program in windows, which reboots to go to ms-dos mode to run partition magic. the computer says the program is too big to load into memory and to hit enter to go back to windows. i hit enter and it tries to load the program again in ms-dos mode. basically i’m stuck in an endless loop, and the only things i can do are boot to beos - which i would actually prefer if the computer could do anything there - or work from a dos prompt.
i’ve been cleaning up hd space in dos mode to see if that will help, but i’ve gotten up over 700 mb free now and it’s still a no go. any ideas on how to exit the loop?
thanks in advance
so, i inherited a laptop (hp omnibook xe3) with win98. i installed beos r5 pro from cd, using partition magic to chop the 8 gb drive to 6.5 for windows/1.5 for beos. long story short, the laptop is not well supported (no graphics driver, no sound driver, no network driver, etc) and now i'm trying to remove the beos partition to free up hard drive space, as the os is not very useful on this particular machine. i ran the "remove beos partition" program in windows, which reboots to go to ms-dos mode to run partition magic. the computer says the program is too big to load into memory and to hit enter to go back to windows. i hit enter and it tries to load the program again in ms-dos mode. basically i'm stuck in an endless loop, and the only things i can do are boot to beos - which i would actually prefer if the computer could do anything there - or work from a dos prompt. i've been cleaning up hd space in dos mode to see if that will help, but i've gotten up over 700 mb free now and it's still a no go. any ideas on how to exit the loop? thanks in advance
Well, let’s see if I can help a bit here.
Is your goal to get primarily BeOS running on this box?
Do you care at all for the existing Win98 installation? Can it go away entirely? Are you OK with reinstalling it completely if BeOS doesn’t work properly?
What are the hardware specs (amount of RAM, CPU brand, graphics, sound, network chipsets makers/models)?
I personally don’t recommend using Partition Magic. You might grab a Linux livecd with gparted on it or something instead - since it’s fairly powerful and supports many features now.
It might be better to ask for help on the #beos or #haiku IRC channel on freenode - since there are plenty of people there willing to give live support/suggestions to just about anyone at various hours of the day.
I’m not sure I fully understand what your current situation is - can you no longer boot Win98?
yes, my current situation is that i can no longer boot win98. i am stuck in an endless loop of trying to start partition magic in ms-dos mode.
unfortunately, i am kind of attached to the windows partition. i’m borrowing the computer indefinitely from my dad (he got a new laptop) and it still has a lot of files on it from him. i may need to return it at some point, and/or he might need the files. additionally, i’ve been using it at work and need to use things like ms word and excel for writing/editing manuscripts. unfortunate, i know.
my long term goal will be to run haiku on this machine, but my short term goal (today, for example) is to be able to do something with it, like boot back to my fully functional windows partition.
specs of the machine are as follows
intel celeron 650
128 mb ram
s3 Savage video card (could be MX or IX-MV…not sure - s3 savage driver on bebits doesn’t work)
ESS Allegro sound
don’t know about the network card - BeOS claims it’s made by Accton Technology Corp.
- up to 1500 mb free space now, still not working
sorry the specs aren’t more detailed, but i don’t have any of the original documentation for the machine, can’t find great details online, and can’t get to windows to get full device names.
well that took entirely too long. it’s been too long since i worked in dos…
if anyone else gets caught in that loop, the way to fix it is to look in the autoexec.bat file (duh) and comment out the lines calling the partition magic executables.
i didn’t figure out out how to get PM to load, but that’s something i’ll live with for now.
if anyone else gets caught in that loop, the way to fix it is to look in the autoexec.bat file (duh) and comment out the lines calling the partition magic executables.
Ah, yes – that makes sense… 
As for getting BeOS to run - the S3 Savage probably will only work halfway-decent in VESA mode. I have messed with this chipset on another machine and it definitely sucks.
Playing around with partitions and alternative OSes on a machine containing possibly-important files is not a good idea. I have had to reinstall my windows machines from scratch many many times while screwing around with stuff like that… now I usually swap HDs any time I want to mess with different OSes as I have too many important things on my windows drives that I don’t have time to rebuild/restore.
Same problem?
http://www.bedrivers.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19&highlight=savage
In the haiku source there are now a s3Savage but it’s the same that was in BeBits.