Activate a BeOS partition after installing Windows

After installing/upgrading Windows, you’ll lose bootman. To get back into BeOS, you typically need a BeOS CD or boot floppy (once booted, just re-run “bootman”). If you don’t have a CD or boot floppy, this technique will get you back in business.

• Start the computer in MS-DOS mode
  • Power on computer
  • Press F8 several times after the memory count.
  • Choose “Command Prompt Only”
• Run FDISK and set active partition to BeOS partition
  • C:/> FDISK
  • Choose Set active partition
  • Set your BeOS partition as the active partition
• Restart the computer (and you will enter BeOS)
• Run bootman
  • Launch a Terminal
  • $ bootman
• That’s it!

You can use this trick on most OSes that can set other partitions as active. You can use this technique from DOS 2.x on. I also believe you can use this method with WinNT, OS/2, and linux with their versions of fdisk.