Can I do a full stand-alone install with BeOS Personal Edition 5, or do I always have to start via windows or a boot disk?

Yes you can.

Do you want a beos only laptop or a dual boot?

You can do a standalone install, but you'd have to do it from inside Beos. Create a new partition of 512M on your hard drive, if you don't already have multiple partitions; then use your floppy to boot into BeOS and run 'Installer' from your 'Applications' menu. Choose the new partition as your install location, and you're good to go! *Remember* to install Bootman at the end of it, or you may not be able to boot back into Windows afterward...

A BeOS only laptop, completely without windows. It hasn't got a CD writer though, so i'm having trouble making an install disk.

There are places that sell the beos R5.03 or even the R5.1 CD so you don't have to burn your own. I would go to Purplus and get the OEM disk. Old laptops sometimes will not read burned CD's. The old CD-drive is the fault.

There is a way you could use your current install but I assume you just don't have that big of a hard drive to have two or more beos installs.

I'd get a CD like Developers Edition that boots from boot floppy or CD and runs the installer program.

There's four gig hd space, that's not the limiting factor. It's got a fully formatted hard disk, i want to be able to install beos but i don't have any windows disks to put on first. I can boot it into dos 7.1 with a boot disk and get the cd drive to work, but i can't make an install cd to use from there, as the free download needs to be installed through windows.

No. You can get the linux version that is tarred and zipped. It should unzip to 500meg. On a blank formatted drive (partition to about 550meg) you put that file (image.be) under C:\beos\. Actually you can put the beosmax or dev edition iso file there and rename it to image.be and it will work too. Then use boot disk to boot to install. Then run installer and don't forget bootman. Then delete image.be. Use the blank drive for a fat swap file. Remember no beos file can be on another filesystem unzipped.

See wiki.bebits dot com for page installways for ideas.

Cheers, i've done it now and it works pretty well. Is there a way to boot straight to the second partition without bootman, or to set bootman not to have a delay? I have to wait five seconds. I also can't get the laptop keyboard to work, i'm going to try a seperate external keyboard.

Yes you can boot without bootman. I forgot how. Might look at script "makebootable" or something like that. Sorry, can't remember. You can also set the time to 1 second. See betips dot net for keyboard ideas.