hmmmm I have a burned Cd of the R5 Pro I have successfully installed PE and like it quite a bit. Biggest problem for me is the 500MB partition. I had set up a partition for BeOS using the included partition magic SE on the CD. When I insert the cd using XP it auto loads the installer. however I cannot (with or without a boot floppy) get my machine to boot from the CD and finish the R5 pro installation. Is there ANY way to get the files to install to the BeOS Partition while booted into XP (i think not because xp sees the BeOS partion as unformatted) or when booted in PE. Or in fact any other way at all to install R5 Pro. I have a P3 I have gonae as far as removing the HD from the boot sequence. my machine will scan the cd but will not boot from it with or without the BeOS boot floppy.

Woooaa there. If you have the boot floppy then put it with the CD and wait for the "Loading..." Then press the space bar and choose boot from CD. If you copied the CD correctly you should get to the installer. If not you will see no choice as you appear to have now. You just can't copy the files. You can use roxio or maybe nero to do a cd copy operation. The other idea is to use a black CD-R. They work better on older CD burners. The age of your system makes me think that it will not fully burn and read CD-R's for BeOS. Might try that CD and see if it will boot on another newer machine to test it. The PM for BeOS is soo old it is not a good choice at all for xp. You need PM 8.1 for XP. I'd consider using a linux version of a partiton magic clone. Or I'd use a virutal machine. MS's virtual PC is free and works fine for BeOS. This is good but your system is a bit old maybe so VPC might be a bit slow looking.