BeOS

[choasmaster]

i got my dirty little hands on a copy of the linux BeOS installer, just one problem, the floppy drive on my system doesn't work, how do i use grub to to boot a floppy.img file. does the chain loading feature work, or just how would i boot it, cuase i wanna use BeOS

[Gooseberry Clock]

Buy a new floppy drive.

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: * Red Ranger Software * / Blob ]

[choasmaster]

must i make myself overly simple, the fdc on the mb is phucked. but i shouldn't have had to specified that.

[Calum]

Buy a new floppy drive.

Fuck off, clock.
What a fucking fucktard. If you don't know the answer, then fuck the fuck off, for gods' sake.

Now that that's out of my system, does anybody (finally) have an answer for the original question?

[TheQuirk]

Where did you get the copy? I always wanted to try it...

[Master of Reality]

the chainloader shouldnt work (in my mind), it only lets the floppy/other partition take over the rest of booting. I dont have a real answer for you... yet.

[SpeeDFreaK]

Couldn't you just boot off of a CD-R? I would think it could be done...

[choasmaster]

ahh, i already tried to, i think it was www.bebits.com that i got both the windows installer and the linux one, youll have to look but its all there i think. or i could send it to you on irc or something

[creedon]

OK guys, if you want to try out BeOS, do a Google search for "BeOS 5.0 Presonal Edition"; it's a size-limited version of BeOS that runs on top of Windows 9x, 2000, ME.  Now, here's how to get around the size limitation, and install to a partition on your H.D.  When you get personal Edition running, look over the menu of utilities, you'll see a utility called "Installer".  This utility can install a copy of Personal Edition to an empty partition on your H.D., just follow the directions, and you'll have a dedicated Beos partition set up that you can make bootable with GRUB.  If you like Beos, go to http://www.beosonline.com/index.php
it's a german site that has ISO images of BeOS 5.03 (the last released version).  They're available for D/L, and the instructions are there for burning the CD's under Linux, Windows or using BeOS's own burner program which comes with the Personal Edition.

[voidmain]

I can tell you what I have done in the past to boot a floppy image without a floppy drive.  Create a very small partition just larger than your floppy image (4MB may be the smallest partition you can make).  Then "dd" the floppy image to that partition and set up your boot loader to boot that partition like any other bootable partition:

dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda?

where /dev/hda? is the small parition you just created.

If you do not have any free space on your drive and you need to create some and are running ext2 file systems you can use "resize2fs" to resize the partition and create some free space (should work on ext3 paritions too but am not sure). If you use reiserfs you can use the "resize_reiserfs" command. And of course if you are using FAT* or NTFS you can use Parition Magic.

[edit] There may be a way to use the floppy image directly but I know the above method will work.  I have done it for a Linux install, should work just as well on a BeOS install.

[ July 22, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Kintaro]

Thats what I was going to say, you could just boot in in a Virtual Machine (Bochs, VmWare)

http://bochs.sourceforge.com
http://www.vmware.com
Bochs kicks ass!
I use it all the time!

(Bit like FreeBSD to setup, but its nice once you work it out, have any prob's dont hesitate to bitch at me!)

[voidmain]

That Bochs link should have been http://bochs.sourceforge.net/