Hello i'm having trouble booting beos the install went smoothly but when it came time to click on the desktop icon to reboot into beos my screen just goes black and freezes so i gave a boot floppy a try clicked on the create bootdisk icon reset and booted off the disk and just prints "be loader........" and prints twelve periods and then crashes every time its beos personal edition and i'm running it on a Cyrix 6x86 (586 non-mmx) with 24mbs ram i'm not using a scsi hardisk (are IDEs and atapi the same thing?) well anyway and i have a creative sb32 sound card my partioning scheme is as follows primary fat16 450mbs housing win98 follow by a extended partion encompassing the rest of the hard disk with three logical partions windows swap 70mbs fat16 windows applications 350 compressed fat16 and 1500mb fat32 logical partion holding my user data (and beos) also my harddisk is set to LBA mode with 635 cylinders i believe. on a 2.5GB drive now on one of the messages i read earlier someon mentioned that beos must be on the first partion? is that true for personal edition? my bios trys to set my hardisk up as DMA and until i disabled it in the bios that would crash lilo (i'm not sure if its DMA or not but i don't now what to do about it) also i've tried holding down the space bar but the bootloader still crashs just the same. (have never seen anything beyond the the be loader) if anyone knows something i'm doing wrong (or just how to fix the problem) feel free to email me at kupidthemoogleoflove@yahoo.com thanks

I think it is the cpu. BeOS only works on some cyrix that are full pentium based.

Use safe mood by tapping on spacebar when the loader text comes up. Or did you try it already?

well that sucks (And yes i did try the space bar) i guess i'll have to upgrade also i heard on this forum that beos pro has to be on the first primary partion? is that true for the personal edition?

The personal edition would boot I think from any readable dos partition. The (pro edition or installed PE to partition) I think must be on a primary but doesn't have to be on the first. I still think it is your processor. Can't you find a $30 junk box that has a supported processor? Look at Frizbe.net for ideas.

I noticed you wrote 25mbs Ram (it looks like you mean 25Megs Ram). Go ahead a buy another chip (ram), you may just be under the required limits. other possib: old BIOS (that's a rather small drive too).. atapi = ATA peripheral interface (I think) - cd, pcmcia, zipdisk, LS120, Tape... ATA=IDE (not really, but for the most part, yes)

Can't say about your hardware, but I have a comment regarding the install location. I have BeOS PE re-installed on it's own partition. It is the most flexible operating system as far as installation. Primary or extended logical, slave or master, it doesn't care. The pro version shouldn't have any problems either. I doubt the install location is the source of your problem. There is a hardware compatibilty list on the Internet somewhere... Best Luck, Bob