How do I install the BeOS? On a dedicated hard drive, or hard drive partition?

1. Create a partition for the BeOS on your hard drive. This can mean dedicating a whole hard drive to the BeOS, or it can be one of the four "hard" partitions on your existing hard drive.

   The partition must be at least 100 megabytes (preferably more). You can put the BeOS on either primary or secondary IDE interfaces, master or slave drives, and on any (hard) partition on any such drive. We're quite flexible as to where we can be installed.

   Be is bundling a limited (but still very useful) version of PowerQuest's PartitionMagic, specially designed to make creating a partition for the BeOS easy and painless. You can read more about the deal in a PowerQuest press release:

   http://www.powerquest.com/press/be.html

2. Insert the BeOS Installer CD and boot floppy disk into your computer.

3. Reboot your system, and boot from the floppy disk, which will load the BeOS and launch the BeOS Installer from the BeOS Installer CD.

4. Install the BeOS using the BeOS Installer (this part is virtually identical to installing onto a PowerPC system).

We can recommend the commercial software System Commander Deluxe, from VCOM, and the commercial version of PartitionMagic for creating or rearranging your hard drive partitions in preparation for installing the BeOS. You can find more information about these products on their web sites:

http://www.v-com.com/
http://www.powerquest.com/