Long story but back in the day I had a BeOS 5 machine. All that remains of that machine is the hard drive. I have cloned the disk and have it as a .vdi file. Unfortunately I am unable to boot a virtual machine with this vdi file as the boot image. It comes up with the boot menu, I can select BeOS then it goes to the load screen sits for a few seconds and then kernel panics. No amount of using BeOS safe mode seems to get me past this stage. I have followed the process here:Running BeOS 5 in QEMU (i386) and also here: Overview | Build your own BeBox and run BeOS using Virtualbox | Adafruit Learning System in hopes that it might be a simple setting that is off. Still no joy. My only remaining hope is to do a fresh install of BeOS5 and port my data/apps off of this vdi image. Anyone here have any suggestions? This BeBox had a running Corum III that I bought at retail, if I recall it was Purplus or something like that. I’d like to see it in action again. Thanks.
You can use a hard drive as a virtual drive in virtualbox. It basically creates a mapping to the drive.
I’ve done this and created a separate vmdk, then installed from physical drive to virtual drive with installer.
Edit: this doesn’t show the windows command correctly. Missing slashes. Also I’ve had better luck in virtualbox 6 than 7.
Safe boot should disable user addons. You may be able to use a fresh install of BeOS in VBox, or Haiku, to make sure there aren’t any problem drivers that are in system rather than config.
Hah! I actually got it to boot directly from my disk image under 86box. Some niggles to work out but looks promising!
UPDATE
I am really really close to having this be 100% functional.
The only issue I have at the moment is I must boot into safe mode otherwise I receive /boot/beos/system/Tracker has encountered an error. When that happens you can only reboot the box as it will fail to launch any applications.
Works fine in safe mode. Any ideas?
Well after a bit of tweaking I have sound, played an old Ozzy mp3 and ran Doom all in safe mode. Corum III unfortunately is a no-go. Apparently there is some issue with the video emulation.
I’m not familiar with 86box, having only used it once. I’d test a fresh install, and see if you have the same issues. If not, maybe try to replace various system files with fresh install version. Or replace drivers/move 3rd party drivers to a test folder somewhere.
What graphic card are you emulating?
Well I worked around the Tracker crash by munging the bootscript to launch Terminal instead of the Tracker. That allowed my to boot into non-safe mode. Once there I was able to launch GLTeapot, which works fine although at a limited FPS, only around 17 which was reported by another guy that played around with this. I can launch Quake2/Doom and even Corum III. Unfortunately Corum III is only able to draw a box before crashing. The Debug of it says:
invalid opcode occurred
#File GifTranslator test
#File GifTranslator test
+7898 ea107898: * f8840f cmove %eax, %edi
game:
So I think that is the end of this journey. I can live without Corum III, there’s a Windows version and I understand GoBe Productive 2 runs on Haiku now. I don’t see much here to keep if I am honest. Corum III was really what I was after since I know it doesn’t work on Haiku. Perhaps this 86box emulator has the same issue as Haiku. There are some missing video calls/features. Too bad this was 99% there.
Try removing the GIF translator; I’m not sure Corum actually needs it.
Basically BeOS didn’t come with GIF support except in Net+ for patent reasons; and there were a few different GIF translators around - I think Gobe had one, and there was one on BeBits and possibly more; then the OpenBeOS one turned up and so on.
As for Corum III on Haiku - the main issue in the past was Haiku didn’t handle the weird multi-session CD it was on. I don’t know if there’s further issues, or if that was fixed.
Where do I find the module for GifTranslator? I can try disabling it.
I did a global search of the filesystem for “GifTranslator*” and it returned no results.
/boot/home/config/addons/translators or /boot/beos/addons/translators I think, not being in front of an R5 box now. It should be in the former location and will probably be called GIF Translator
Just move it somewhere else rather than delete it
Holy Crap that did it! CorumIII running on BeOS 5 in 86box (4.2.1),
This also fixed an issue I was having with SoundPlay. Need to spend a little more time with it but wow. This is the closest I’ve been getting BeOS to work in an emulator. Thanks to all that chimed in.
Basically BeOS didn’t come with GIF support except in Net+ for patent reasons; and there were a few different GIF translators around - I think Gobe had one, and there was one on BeBits and possibly more; then the OpenBeOS one turned up and so on.
That would make a little sense. I have a licensed version of GoBe Productive on this image as well. Basically I took the old IDE drive, stuffed it in an old PC I have, booted to a Linux disk, dd’d the drive to a portable SSD. Took that SSD to my modern box, DD’d the SSD to an image file and then set up 86box and mounted/booted the image. Pretty straightforward just needed to put a lot of pieces together to pull it off. I have tinkered with this BeOS install for the past 20 years. Looks like at some point I tried using the Haiku Unified Nvidia driver on it. 
I am not sure if this same process would work with a fresh install since this installation has a lot of cruft that while hindering it in some regards may be responsible for Corum actually working. Ideally, I could get it to work under Haiku. Seems like I’ve tried that a few times. I think as far as I got was the loading animations.
I’ll try give it a go over the weekend, I actually have my Corum III box in my line of sight right now (along with Gobe Productive actually). I dumped 90% of my boxed software before doing house renovations but kept all my BeOS related stuff.
Ha! I did the exact same thing. I have an old Thinkpad that I run Haiku builds on.
Getting ready to try Beta5.
Did the same with my various computer related books except the BeOS ones and also the book that taught me how to build PCs for nostalgia reasons.