Okay, so I seem to be having a lot of difficulty making a bootable BeOS CD. I looked on BeTips or whatever that site is called and found lots and lots of how-to pages, but none of them worked. I tried to follow its advice for if you were using Nero (which I am)... and I tried a lot of things (all on a CD-RW because I only have like 25 CD-Rs), like making it a bootable CD and putting the 512 MB image on the CD... no matter what I tried, it would never be able to find a bootable volume. --------------- Also, recently, for whatever reason, I can't get it to boot. I had burned the image file, ZBEOS, and loadbeos.com to a CD-R, and I took this to my other computer (P120, 48 MB RAM, and a 4X CD-ROM which is not too reliable). I ran loadbeos.com directly from the CD, which crashed and required a hard reboot, but I found that that was because I had QEMM running... so I clean-booted (except for CD-ROM driver) and ran loadbeos again. It got partway through the bootup and then stopped with some stuff about no bootable image. I copied the image to the root directory of a mostly blank FAT16 drive. Same thing. I had a zipped copy of the image on another CD, which I had used previously to install on the same system, and decompressed this - yielding the same thing about no bootable volume. I have installed BeOS before, both on this system and on others, without _any_ trouble, why won't it work now?

Ok, run on question huh? Can't say about the boot off a CD. I used my window98 startup disk and made a bootable CD and included loadbeos.com and zbeos. Zbeos has to be for the version that you installed. 4 won't boot 5 and 5 won't boot dano. Dunno why. When my computer boot's to dos I type in loadbeos at the command prompt and it seems to find installed beos volumes using safe mode start. Yes you can zip an "image.be" file but you must copy it as a complete and unbroken file. You will have to defrag your disk and hope that there are no un-moveable fragments in your copy area. Otherwise you have to find some old dos commands to force an (maybe) xcopy to install your unzipped file as a complete unbroken file. Also your compression method can't change the file size one bit. Lastly it has to be under C:\beos\ or \Beos\

(a) The file was just a giant 45 MB ZIP, and it was lossless compression (unless there was an error, of course, which I think InfoZip would have picked up on). I dumped it onto an archives CD that I had. I decompressed it and everything... no errors... (b) I'm fairly sure that the file was not fragmented. I had just created a temporary 530 MB partition on the 2nd hard drive, formatted it to FAT16, and copied the files there directly (the first time, directly from the CD, and the second time, I copied the ZIP file to another drive and unzipped it to the temporary partition). Mainly, I planned to run it off of that, and then clone it to another small temporary partition with Installer, change the 1st 530 MB partition to type EBh, boot the newly cloned BeOS version, and then run Installer and clone it back to the original area it was in. Don't understand? I do, I'm just not good at explaining it. I've done it before, I know it works... WAIT! Right there... Last line in your reply... "Lastly it has to be under C:\beos\ or \Beos\" Perhaps that's my problem.

Ok... I somehow got it... Basically, I looked again on BeTips and followed the directions exactly. I got mkhybrid for BeOS so I could make a floppy boot image... Unsurprisingly enough, my CD burner was instantly supported in BeOS, and the entire CD was burned at my burner's full 20X, without any kind of flakiness or instability that tend to burn lots of coasters in Windoze. I booted with the CD in the drive, and BeOS booted in, I believe, 10 seconds, once I had hit space and told the boot menu to boot from CD-ROM.