Is it possible to install beos onto cdr and boot into it?
I would like to try this on a laptop without a hard drive.

I tried but it did not work. Maybe it depends on your cd-rom drive if it works or not. Just try it, then you also have a copy of a working beos image if something goes wrong sometime (if your laptop can read CD-RW, then I would try that).

Last year, I booted my BeOS Pro Edition 5.0 CD-ROM from Gobe and used it (this was actually necessary for some reason I can't remember) to do something I can't recall prior to installing BeOS on a hard disk. There's a way to stop/bypass the installation wizard during boot. I wish I had more information for you right now, but It is definitely possible to boot BeOS using a CD and use it that way, although all sorts of limitations may apply (you won't have virtual memory, for one thing.).

You could try looking for information about this on the Be Tips Server. I'm sure people have done this and that there's additional information about it.

For what it's worth, I was using Plextor optical drives (it seemed to boot fine from either the UltraPlex CD-ROM drive or the PlexWriter CD-R/W drive) interfaced using an Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI host adapter in a pretty typical configuration.

There is a post at betips.net and osnews.com and
begroovy.com about this. On betips it is make a
free PE CD or something like that. Read all the
posts. Basically you install a PE onto you HD and
then put it on to a CD.

I tried and succeeded in creating a bootable Beos CD, where some apps could run (as install a new beos) , some other not. The main issue I have is: I do not have a tmp dir or emulate a writable area to allow tmp files to be created. 2nd issue: I did not spend anymore time to solve this...