I can make a dump my BeBox hdd, so you could try that after updating the bootom to the dr8 version.
While searching for an appropriate scsi cd drive…
Oh that would be great @lorezan, thanks!
Re @Eddy’s suggestion, I have a SCSI2SD on the way, just as I was typing this I got an email from the postal service saying it would be delivered today! 
SCSI2SD is not a good soution acutally in this case… since it’s too slow, and BeBoxen already have IDE which is trivial to get drives and or passive adapters cheaply for.
SCSI2SD is targeted at mid-late 80’s SCSI systems not mid 90s…
Even the V6?
I thought this one was fully compatible with SCSI-2 and could go up to 10MBps.
I know V5 is slow, less than half the speed of the v6.
Double checking myself you are correct… BeBox tops out at 10MBps. You could in theory drop in a SYM53C860 controller and double the input clock to the SCSI controller somehow, and get FAST-20 working, but that would require modifying the SCSI drivers also to enable it. I was thinking it already supported FAST-20.
V5 is more like 1/5th-10th the speed since it doesnt’ support syncronous transfers at all.
Thanks for checking.
I intend to buy a v6 in the near future for my BeBox and also maximize the memory to 1GB (just for the fun of doing it).
I also have a 3Dfx for it (pci 2000 16 MB) from my first BeOS compatible PC.
Just talking about it gives me goosebumps.
Dunno that 1GB acutally works… didn’t boot when I tried. It’s not terribly expensive though to try it.
I’ll probably post again if I ever get it working
Generally speaking I’d agree - but this one is too old to support booting from IDE CD-ROM. That comes in with DR9, and Rev 5 and older boards can’t boot past DR8, so I think the SCSI2SD is important for bootstrapping, and I’m a bit of a retrocomputing nerd, so I figure I’ll find a use for it 
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Had a bit of a hacking day today with two friends, and another BeBox. As far as I can tell, there are three BeBox’es in Perth, and the other owner is a friend of mine from high school “PC” (and one of the guys behind vMac). Another friend of mine, “EN”, the author of tbxi, joined us. PC’s BeBox is in great shape - except the connections on the SCSI cable are all brittle, so unplugging and replugging is not great for it.
We found out/confirmed a few new bits of information - namely, the Trio64 card I obtained didn’t work with either BeBox, but more than that, without a compatible video card, it doesn’t show the boot rom version out of the serial monitor! But, we put the number 9 video card into the rev 5, and it actually starts booting up… it shows the animated grey Be logo out of the VGA, but that is as far as we got. I’ve kept the card for now - PC has a Matrox Millenium which works fine and better in his, which doesn’t get a whole bunch of use anyway.
Be Boot ROM version 1.1d6
Jan 8 1996 16:20:55
Rev 5 motherboard
Copyright © 1991-96 Be Incorporated. All Rights Reserved
Configured boot device is ‘/dev/ide_disk_master’
fsmount failure
fsmount failure
Soo… uhh this is a pretty early ROM revision.
So given the target is running DR8.3 on it, the first thing to try would be making a new ROM boot disk. Boot disk images are at http://web.archive.org/web/20061013105135/http://www.bebox.nu/tech.php?s=tech/bootROM/download - we got the DR8 bootROM from there, and imaged it onto a floppy using PC’s Rev 6 BeBox, verified it has the bootrom.image and bootnub.image files, along with an updater file, then moving the disk and the drive into the Rev 5. But while it did a seek at startup, it didn’t read the disk more than a single read or two, nor update the firmware.
Next thing we tried was @lorezan’s full disk image - we’ve been chatting by message and it should be a full disk - we tried it imaged onto a IDE drive and it didn’t boot on the rev 5, and we also put it on a SCSI2SD and it wouldn’t boot the Rev 6 either. “EN” is a bit of an Apple hacker, so we had a look and it didn’t look like a partitioned drive - so we faked an Apple Partition Map, manually edited it to show as Be_BFS, and put the disk image into that, but still no boot on the Rev 5 (or Rev 6) - we could see the partition, and BeOS 5 recognised it as an “ofs” (Old BeFS) but failed to mount it.
We also tried it in the Rev 5, and it didn’t boot it. We also tried looking for a “good” DR8 ISO - the ones we could find were a Mac-only version of DR8.3, and an improperly dumped version of DR8.2.
@cb88, in your post you mention having DR8 CDs - might you be able to image them and make an ISO available for me to try to burn, to try booting the thing with? Plan is to get a SCSI CD-ROM, burn the disk, then try to install onto the IDE drive I have - and if no luck on the Rev 5, PC will do it on the Rev 6 and then we move the drive over.
So… not got to an installed system yet… but it’s getting further, got video output, and we’re getting more out of the serial monitor!
This may help for SCSI drives:
Sony CD Drive - ASIN: B00004RJZG
As far as the graphic cards, Matrox Mill I/II PCI cards usually work. Diamond Stealth 64 PCI is good.
Usually, get BeOS installed to HD with the newer BeBox and move it to the older BeBox.
The Matrox card is supported in later versions of the OS, and bootrom, i think.
DRx versions have a really short list of compatible graphic cards, which are listed in the faq on the archived be.com website.
Another good source of info is the comp.sys.be archive, covering 1996 upto March 1997:
http://lorezan.free.fr/collection/be/BeSpecific/BeSpecific2_InformationArchive.tar.gz
From July 1997 to June 1998:
http://lorezan.free.fr/collection/be/BeSpecific/BeSpecific5_x86-InformationArchive.tar.gz
June 1998 to March 1999:
http://lorezan.free.fr/collection/be/BeSpecific/BeSpecific6_x86-InformationArchive.tar.gz
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No idea if this is dumped correctly but this is dr8 pressed disk attempted dump from isobuster, in bin/cue format.