I timed BeOS's boot time from the point of pushing the power button on my Inwin case: Almost exactly 50s. This included the mounting of one FAT32 partition and the opening of all the windows I left open @ shutdown. I love this OS, shame shame how it wasn't allowed to continue to be developed.

So anyone running it w/a faster processor? Boot faster than this? Just curious...

If you want to get it to boot faster then a few things can be done.
Make a boot CD that only contains the copy of the boot floppy for your machine.
See betips.net for makebootfloppy /base and use the tips at beosonline.com for how they burned the boot image to a CD. Just use your image from floppy. I think it is cat /dev/floppy/raw > boot.img then change to match for building a bootable CD.

Then if you are real brave,,,, start zipping files for devices that you don't have installed. If you know what devices you have using drivers then get rid of those extra files until just your config exists. I say brave because if you goof then you need to restore the file from another bootable BeOS install or from running the CD standalone.

I run on an 1900+ AMD but some of the boot time is taken up by extended post and other stuff.

I think you can get to about 12 seconds after your post on a fairly fast machine or less!

Wow, that's insane! 12s??? I know I'm behind the times w/my K6-2, and have been interested in moving up to something else, but fear BeOS's incompatibility. I have a dual pIII gateway 6400 server that beos will not boot on. I assume it's just a wierd bios (it's an asus board w/a f**ked up gateway bios), but it makes me cautious to upgrade...

I'll try those tips on faster booting though!

Thanx,
Joey

I using P4-2.0G , with Beos5 start about 15s ,

For my own test, my system is using an AMD 1Ghz (overclocked at 1.3Ghz). At the end of POST towards using time is between 10s to 13s.