http://pulkomandy.tk/~beosarchive/index.pl?search=bootloader
Thanks guys! I’ll try it out today. I was looking for the wrong filename in the archives… no wonder I couldn’t find it.
enlinea, out of curiosity… what’s your hardware specs? mobo and such.
It’s an older board; I think it’s close to the upper limit that BeOS will still work on, as far as “seeing” all cores in multi-core processors. Extra PCI cards are necessary for ethernet, sound, and IDE. I used the BeOS and Modern Hardware website as a guide. I’ve got a similar board (Biostar TForce P965) that BeOS seems to want to work on, but I need to play with it to see for sure. I’m fairly sure it worked on a newer DFI P35 board, but that was a couple years ago and I had to use the board for another project, so I can’t remember for sure. One thing that’s necessary for BeOS to see more than one core, is the MPS option in the motherboard’s BIOS settings. That’s the main reason newer boards won’t work, since MPS is probably phased out by now. That’s too bad, because I’d like to see if BeOS would work with newer processors like the i3, i5, and i7 series. No practical reason for it, but it’s just fun to experiment with.
DFI P965-S
Intel Q6700 Quad 2.67 Ghz processor
Gskill 512MB DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM
ATI Radeon X300SE PCI-e video card
Promise Ultra 100 PCI IDE card
Soundblaster Live soundcard
Realtek 8139C ethernet card
Haiku, BeOS 5.03, and Puppy Linux in the Grub bootloader.
Unfortunately, the RAM limiter didn’t work out. Replaced zbeos with the new one, but it won’t boot into anything other than failsafe video mode now. Will try out the floppy-boot method and see if that works, as soon as the new floppies arrive.
In case someone finds this thread in the future - the ram limiter also didn’t work for me but the solution here did: Extract zbeos boot loader from image
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This helped. Unfortunately it only works with 2GB installed. Any more and the system hangs on the Devices icon at boot splash screen.
Does number of DIMMs installed matter, or is it something else? I’d like to use 4GB for Haiku.
This thread is about BeOS, not Haiku and shouldn’t be applicable. 4GB should work just fine in Haiku if your board/cpu supports it.
I’m sorry I should’ve been more clear. I installed the boot loader into BeOS, but with 4GB installed, BeOS hangs during the startup processes.
I would just physically remove RAM, but I’m booting alongside of Haiku.
Why you want to use a 23 years “unused” os?
Use BeOS with a virtial machine if you want to use it or use Haiku.
This isn’t helpful. I’m sure everyone is aware of VMs and Haiku. If you’re genuinely interested why someone wants to run a 20+ year old OS, just ask that, preferrably leaving out the ‘dead’ part. It’s bound to rub people the wrong way… 
I asked. I’m really interested in why people are bothering with this, so many years after the end of BeOS. It is no longer used anywhere and there are no current drivers for it.
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I may have misinterpreted the tone of the second sentence. Was a bit imperative… All good.
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Perhaps because BeOS was a commercial OS, some tend to think that it must has been better in some ways. Better hardware support, more available software… That’s completely wrong but I think that they have to discover that by themselves. Only things that I really miss are Refraction and StampTV. Since then TV has gone digital so…
There were commercially sold drivers for one DVB-T and one DVB-S card for BeOS as far as I remember; but considering in lots of places you would need MPEG4 support for DVB-T, and DVB-S2 on satellite (or ATSC/ISDB) that still wouldn’t be enoguh
Actually as far as I know, some people do still “use” BeOS.
But for my purposes, I enjoy using it. I like using Haiku too, but why wouldn’t I want to use BeOS? On my laptop, it runs much faster than Haiku, and a virtual machine would be very slow on it.
I would also hang out with my Grandpa. He may not be the up and coming thing, but if he wasn’t doing what he was doing, we wouldn’t be here either. 
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Which bootloader did you use? There are the 256 MB, 512MB, and 1GB variants. Try to gather log debug information from BeOS either through the startup or when it loads successfully to desktop.
Someone could set up a VM and test the scenarios…
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But that’s really a few people. Of course, a beos on a 20 year old computer makes more sense than haiku?
Since there are still users, we still have our knowledge base with the BeOS-specific entries online.
You can run BeOS on machines significantly under 20 years old. Core2 era machines are about the latest, and even there are very limited graphics card options once you go past the AGP era - the Matrox G550 PCIE for late 90s performance (this is what I use) or a very very few nvidia cards with PCIE-AGP bridges on board.
But that era of machine will run Win10 with its onboard graphics; and R5 with the Matrox and less RAM.
Its a lot of effort to get all the right bits and very few motherboards work quite right so my ‘fast’ BeOS machine is a few generations older - but still not 20 yet. Pentium D, 512MB RAM, 120GB SATA SSD
As for the bootloader - the 768 and 1GB versions seem to be lost to time; I can only find the 512MB one.
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My computer is almost at the 20 year old mark. Except for the case, that’s more like 25 years.
I’ve not found much to help my problem there. Maybe I’ll look again.
Edit: Haiku also runs on computer older than some that can run BeOS. Pentium II machines are even officially supported.