BeOS Developer Edition 5.04 held out great hope for me because I couldn't get Personal Edition to boot. But to my dismay I discovered it didn't offer any installation options as Linux does. It would have taken over the entire hard drive had I proceeded. Another grouse I have about the Developer Edition is that it doesn't recognise drive space beyond 8 MB. How does BeOS 5 PE Max Edition handle these issues?

You can install the PE or Max as a virtual file system. Make a /beos (case!check betips) Defrag your hard drive and see that there are no non-moveable clusters in the area at the end on the files up to the size of the iso. Copy the iso and rename it to image.be in the /beos (check case for your OS) and it should boot into the virtual file system if you select it from a bootdisk. You will have to open the safe mode options to choose the name of the virtual disk. #2 The 8G is your bios or how you had set up the drive. Some drives have software to cheat the bios. If your bios sees the drive as what it is then it should see just about any size drive you can buy. Get Ranish from ranish.com to check your partition info. That may be the cause too.

jefro, are you suggesting I install BeOS on Linux? Incidentally, I've never liked the idea of installing one OS within another; there is no brand equity or identity left. More suggestions are welcome.

You might be thinking of the old run win3.x from OS/2. Or an emulator application. Not here. You can run BeOS off a linux partiton if you wish. It should run well enough on an ext2/3 (without indexing). I don't think you will see much of a performance loss. The file is a virtual drive and doesn't interact with the base OS at all. You can mount the any supported partition but can't run other OS's apps. (maybe a few linux small scripts will work) I remember running linux from a 166. Gosh! I think I went to work and when I came home it was finally booted. I suspect that the bios can't support any drive over 2 or 4 gig. They used to use a goofy way to cheat bios to use larger drives since the bios's were eeproms and not flash memory. Us e small partitions. Also might have problems in a Phoenix bios. Old ones just seem to be problem. Also there is a gif translator that needs to come out of the Max edition I think. Screws up stuff. Check other forums for more on that. PE and Max and beosonline are the same base OS. Just different drivers and apps.