I am interested in BeOS on my spare PC but it has only got a 166mhz Pentium and 24Mb of RAM, I am planning to format it to install BeOS 5 PE as a single-boot OS, but the hard drive is only 1Gb. Also will I need any patches, drivers, extra software or disks to run or boot BeOS?? Thanks in advance for your help!

Your computer will probably run BeOS just fine without any additional patches; it's newer hardware that has difficulty. You can check the hardware matrix at Frizbe.net to check your specific graphic card, sound card, and modem.

However, BeOS PE must first install into a Windows partition as a demo. Then you can re-install it onto it's own partition. To get around this, you might try one of the free PE-based distributions such as BeOS Max.

Or you can use the hard drive from your spare machine and set it up as Slave in your primary computer and install BeOS on it.

Or you can install PE in Windows on your main machine and create your own customized CD for installing on your spare computer. You can find instructions for this at Betips.net.

Best Wishes,
Bob

Got my friend to download BeOS MAX and he has burnt the ZIP file to CD. How do i install it???

Darn, that old of a machine won't boot from CD will it?
You will need to get a bootfloppy made WITH!! CD support. Or a dos boot disk with CD support and two files. One is loadbeos.com and the other is zbeos . Then from safe mode you will have to tell it to load from CD. Then an installer should work.

Darn again. Max is more for newer machines.
The screen resolution is wayy too high. Use ctrl-alt-shift=F12 to go back to the 640x480 and NO gif translator in the options menu. (SMALL pull down on installer panel)

OK, If you have a machine that has PE on it you can put that HD in and use the installer app to "move" or copy that install to the new 1G hd.

Be sure to go to R5.03