Yeah,

A friend lend me the 4.5 and I cleaned 500Mbytes of my second HD
to try the x86 version.

The CD has an autorun script to install a custom Partition Magic version

for Be. It installs and when you run it you may select a drive to make a

Be partition. It does everything and at the end a window ask you to
eject
the CD and reboot with the boot floppy (???).

Searching the CD (it always try to reinstall the Partition Magic...) I
found
a "booting" folder with cpimage.exe, make.bat and readme. Reading the
"readme" it«s very iluminating, says to run the make.bat from any DOS
window in Win95. I then opened a DOS window, switched to E: (my  CD)
and "cd booting". From there I finnaly typed make<enter>.
The swift cpimage.exe shows the usage and exited. The make.bat doesn«t
work.  Then I read the make.bat and typed it myself:

E:\>\booting\cpimage zbeos a:<enter>

For my surprise the cpimage started to (?) copy the zbeos disk image to
a
formatted floppy in drive A:. It then wrote something like ...successful

created... and quited. (heaven)

Ok, now the boot floppy is created and I finnaly may evaluate the 15 min

installation time for Be (as they advertise in their site).
I shutdow the PC and rebootted with BIOS set to boot from floppy, and...

the same old Win95 shows up - wonderfull I thinked.

Seaching again the CD and killing the Partition Magic Setup again I
discoverd
a \Win95\BeOS subfolder with a readme (claiming quick&dirty) explaining
I had to copy the BeOS folder to C: (a crap explanation about hardcoded
scripts)
to allow a lean boot fron Win95/DOS. Ok, I copied the sub-folder....
Then I run the BeOS in that folder - it switched Win95 to DOS mode
(rebooting)
and (crying) a blue BeOS 4.5 screen showed up. The boot code started and

sequentially illuminated the circulars icones of the process.

And my stopwatchrunning...

Suddently it stops with a white line message like script error (?).
After a 1000s Win95 reboot and Partition Magic Setup killing, I tried to
copy the
whole tree \Win95\Beos to my C: drive. And here we go again.

This time the Boot process continue until its end copying a lot of stuff
from
the CD to my second HD. Suddently a pointing hand icon shows up.
My two buttons serial Logitech mouse was (?) not connected with
that Icon (anyway) and it desapeared and a agreement window shows up.
>From that moment on I tried all keyboard/mouse combinations until I
found
one key that allowed me to continue - the RESET key.

Three hours later I got an RedHat 6.0 CD and installed it in that 500Mb
partition in less than 15 minutes.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the cpimage never worked and I run Norton
Diskedit in DOS mode just to check the boot sector of that boot floppy
had only zeroes...no boot sector at all.

I then leeched the Be ftp site getting the 4.5.1 bootimage. There I
discovered
in the bootimage.readme that for DOS users the magic program to prepare
the infamos boot floppy is named "rawrite".
(back to Linux) With a copy of rawrite from a Linux distribuiton - no I
didn«t
find it at the Be site, maybe I was so tired I didn«t seached all site -
I finnaly
got a workable boot floppy from the zbeos file. (that one at least
worked)

Well, I give the CD back to my friend and start to learn Linux.

Sorry for my english and maybe this why this attempt didn«t worked.

cheers,
J Souto


Stuart O'Reilly wrote:

> Has anybody had any experience with the BeOS opperating system? Any
> comments?
> Regards
> Stuart