If your CD-ROM drive is a PLEXTOR product, try replacing it with one made by another company.
I fired up my 66MHz BeBox for the first time in over 20 years this weekend. I had stripped it down before storage, but it still had RAM and a 500MB SCSI HDD with R3 installed. I tried a couple of old PCI graphics cards with no luck. I tracked down a Trio 64 card and got that to work in the top PCI slot. It’s really basic - only 2MB of RAM and can only do 800x600 in 32-bit color mode.
No luck with the CDROM drive though. I think there was only one drive fully supported - the Toshiba XM-3601B. I ordered a used one from Ebay and that should complete the setup.
I also ordered a 120GB IDE drive. I’ve read that you can’t boot from IDE, but I’m going to give it a try. The SCSI interface is significantly faster, so I might keep the original drive for boot/OS and use the IDE for other files.
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Mine boots fine from IDE, actually a CF adapter. Much more silent than the SCSI HDD 
Good to know 
The SCSI drive is annoyingly loud even with it’s just idling so I might jump ship to IDE
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Well there are some SCSI HDD emulators now, from SCSI2SD to BlueSCSI and RaSCSI, but even though they are likely cheaper than old 2nd hand SCSI HDDs they are still more expensive than the passive CF adapters.
I’ll give it another try tonight that way. I put the Matrox into my Win98 machine to make sure it works (it does), so I know that’s not the issue.
Alright. Perhaps finally some progress. Following memsom’s advice, I got the following in PuTTY:
ide:wait_status:mask=c0 want=40 cur=00 timeout=3000000.000000 usec
IDE Master Disk:
Mfg: WDC WD300BB-00AUA1 ▒ Ser: WD-WMA6W1492932 Firmware: 18.20D18WDC WD300BB-00AUA1 ▒
Configured boot device is ‘/dev/ide_disk_master’
fsmount(/dev/floppy_disk) failure
fsmount(/dev/ide_disk_master) failure
For this boot, the ONLY device I have attached is the HDD, which is not formatted correctly. Still no video signal, even after several minutes.
Okay - so it is trying to boot. You might find the card is just not being initialised by the Boot Rom.
I wonder if you could use something like ISO Buster to get the PowerPC part of the BeOS install CD and dd that to your IDE drive? I think I had to “convert to ISO” when I did that to make it mount in BeOS as an image. That would at least prove that the drive can boot BeOS.
You should get the Boot Rom build date on the first line of the debug messages.
With DR8:
Be Boot ROM, built Aug 16 1996 18:17:08
Rev 6 motherboard, Rev 5 i/o card
Copyright (C) 1991-96 Be Incorporated. All Rights Reserved
ide:wait_status:mask=c0 want=40 cur=00 timeout=3000000.000000 usec
IDE Master Disk:
Mfg: FUJITSU M1636TAU € Ser: 01241794 Firmware: 5044 FUJITSU M1636TAU €
Configured boot device is ‘/dev/ide_disk_master’
fsmount(/dev/floppy_disk) failure
‘NewDisk’ (fixed, r/w), 2511840 sectors, vol=0, driver=3 (/dev/ide_disk_master)
Booting from device: /dev/ide_disk_master
And further down:
Try to hire cirrus on vol #0 as graphic driver…
cirrus refuse the job
Try to hire s3 on vol #0 as graphic driver…
s3 on vol #0 is the new graphic driver…
There were really only two graphics chips sets supported on the BeBox - Cirrus (5430, 5434, 5436, 5440) and S3 (864, 868, 964, 968, Trio32, Trio64). Those are two that the machine is looking for on boot. You may be able to load a new driver once booted up, but you would need to install the OS via serial first.
I’m using a Trio64 and it looks like there’s a lot of these listed on Ebay. Just search for “s3 trio64”.
Well, no. The Matrox Millennium 2 is supported, as are the IMS/IxMicro Twin Turbo cards. It depends on a number of factors, one being the boot ROM, the other being the OS version. The OS version affects what you can use when booted, the Boot Rom affects what happens with the Be logo splash and whether the boot menu is accessible. The two are quite independent. As I’ve said before, my BeBox would boot with the Matrox Millennium 2 just fine, and got the bot logo and boot menu too, because it had the PR2 boot ROM. The later boot ROMS removed the Matrox cards at boot because the driver was apparently buggy, but I never had an issue.
Yeah, I looked on a cached version of the BeBox.nu site, and if you look at the registry, a good percentage of the BeBoxen have Matrox cards… including mine in this snapshot (I no longer own it…)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090131/http://www.bebox.nu/registry.php
Mine was The BeBox Zone - BeBox Registry
The card was definitely a Matrox Millennium 2 because I had 2 and I flashed one for use in a Mac.
I was looking through my old BeBox stuff. The latest Boot ROM Upgrader floppy I have was PR1. I don’t have one with PR2 and after that the floppy was for booting Intel machines. I’ll need to check to see if what version my ROM is… I may be behind the times
I think you can boot R5 with that boot rom. You can then update the boot rom from within the OS. Although, anything to do with flashing nearly 30 year old flash roms sounds a little scary to me.
This is the info that comes up for my Boot ROM
Be Boot ROM, built Jul 22 1997 16:56:44
Rev 6 motherboard, Rev 5 i/o card
Copyright (C) 1991-97 Be Incorporated. All Rights Reserved
Not sure if that’s when it was flashed or a specific version. PR1 or 2?
Edit: Jul 22 1997 predates the release of PR2 so it’s not PR2 
CD Drive Compatibles:
- Toshiba XM-3401/3601/3701 50-pin SCSI CD-ROM compatible drives
From trawling through Ebay listings I figured out these are:
XM-3401 - 2x with caddy
XM-3601 - 4.4x
XM-3701 - 6.6x
I remember the XM-3701 was one of the fastest and most expensive CDROM drives in 1996… it was also the preferred drive for the BeBox. I managed to use a clunky 1x SCSI drive on my original setup but it didn’t come back to life 25 years later. I have a used XM-3601 on the way.
The boot loader, kernel and video drivers are loaded from FD/CD/HD. So, seems things are working up to this point.
The video card issue.
- Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 PCI
- Matrox Millennium II PCI - use Mac-compatible VBIOS
- S3 Trio64/Trio64+/Trio64V2 PCI
These cards were tested by Be Engineering.
I may very well go with that then.
I just checked my PR2 install and the kernel is dated 1st October 1997. I guess either your boot rom is dated slightly earlier because it was finalised earlier, or it predates PR2, so is probably either AA or PR1. You probably want to eliminate it from being a DR release, because that won’t boot modern BeOS for sure.
Firstly, yes try a different video card - it can’t hurt.
Secondly - no this is not absolutely true. I have seen BeOS hang around the “working out which boot drive” if the hardware is not right, but as I said earlier - it could be something silly like the SCSI bus being unterminated, a cable being unplugged, an IDE drive not being what it expected or the video card being in the wrong slot. Also - BeOS will boot whether or not the video card is recognised by the boot rom, you just won’t get the boot rom selection screen if the video card is not initialised… so as a Matrox card is supported by R5, it should boot to the installer if the rest of the hardware is working.