I'm trying to build myself a separate BeOS box to play with, and since my main box is ugly enough booting between several versions of Linux and Windows, I want to install it on my spare crap PC -- a compaq presario 4712. This machine does not support booting from a CD, so I have been unable to get it to install as of yet. When I take the floppyp4.img file and image it to a floppy disk, I get a strange error about invalid boot floppy records. Does anyone have any advice for me, or should I suck it up and put it on my main box?

Well, do you have a P4 in the spare c^&p PC? If so then only a few P4's have trouble. Most can boot with a PE boot floppy and only might need the safe mode option "don't call bios" If you have an old P123 or amdk56 you will need a plane jane beos boot floppy image. Then you need rawrite to burn it to a floppy. BE SURE that you have a 100% new good floppy. See bootable be cd I think at bebits for a floppy image. If you need the bootfloppy then get one from the Max edition. I think crux.sourceforge.net might have it. Beosonline might have it too. If you have a working install and it is the same processor then use makebootfloppy from terminal. It is a script that you can look at with styledit to see how a boot floppy is made. ORRRR all you need is two files on a dos disk. (usually works) loadbeos.com and zbeos. After a dos boot run loadbeos.com

If you use the makebootfloppy command, be sure to add the -cd to the command so that the bootfloppy will be able to look for the BeOS boot image on the CD.