I have an old Toshiba Libretto model CT50 (P75, 32MB Ram, 6gig HD w/ 1gig free partition for BeOS) running Windows 95. The problem is, this laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and doesn't have a bootable CD-ROM drive (it's a Panasonic PCMCIA CDRom drive that's only accessible after Windows is loaded and the drivers for the CDRom drive are loaded with Windows drivers. I do not have DOS drivers for this drive either). I've downloaded the BeOS v5 Developers Edition as well as the PE Max edition and have burned both to CD using Nero and the .cue files. I can see the contents of the CDs from within Win95 but all I see are 3 files (boot.cat, boot.img, floppy.img)... nothing that I can execute from Win95. Is there anything that I can do to get BeOS installed on this laptop or is it a hopeless cause because I have no Floppy drive and no boot CD drive? Thanks.

I'm almost sure that this page has gotten more confusing than helpful but see it first. http://wiki.bebits.com/page/Install...

Hello and thanks jefro. I did see that page (and I agree that it's rather confusing) but it didn't really help. The good news is that I managed to get a floppy drive that works and actually start the boot floppy. The bad news is that the install freezes with "Sysinit2: 23" being the last thing displayed. I've tried all the SafeMode modes with the same result. I had run BeOS a looong time ago (v3 or v4 I think) on an old Pentium III, was completely impressed and now want to get it running on this ancient P75 laptop but it looks like it's just not going to install so I might have to give up :(

You don't need a boot floppy! You said you have a BeOS personal edition already installed as a virtual file. I might be wrong on this but when you are in BeOS use the "installer" program to install to spare partiton. Matter of fact I know this to work as I did it on a win98 tablet. There is very little difference between a virtual file system running beos and a native beos install. Actually I have noticed nothing. There are ways to create a 1G virtual file too if the installer doesn't work for some reason.

You may benifit greatly from buying a usb to ide adapter from ebay. I had a libretto 50ct a while ago and this was incredibly helpful. Most of these adapters come with a small adapter to use on laptop hard drives. This will allow you to connect your libretto hard drive directly to another pc and transfer files to it. Thats how I installed win98se on my old libretto, I copied the install files and the contents of a boot disc directly to the hard drive. What I wonder about the version of Beos your using is that it may be too new for the hardware. You may want to try and older version before you give up.