Boot Personal Edition without going through Windows

Once you’ve gotten a taste for BeOS, you probably won’t want to be using Windows very often. So why boot all the way into Windows just to boot BeOS? As it happens, the BeOS boot loader, which is present both on the BeOS boot floppy and in Be’s boot manager („bootman“), is capable of finding image.be (which is the raw disk image containing BeOS Personal Edition) no matter where it lives on your hard drive, even if it’s sitting somewhere in a Windows partition.
If you don’t want to Install Personal Edition to a real partition, you’ll need to boot BeOS from a boot floopy. If you do install to a real partition, open a Terminal window and type „bootman„. The wizard will lead you through the simple process of installing a new master boot record, capable of booting BeOS and many other operating systems.
Another way to do this, without using a floppy is to boot Windows and hit F8 as it starts booting. Boot quickly to a DOS prompt and type:

c:eosloadbeos.com

This will start the BeOS launcher, without requiring you to go through Windows first.
Geek note: The reason why the bootman technique can’t be used with the Personal Edition „virtual partition“ is because bootman needs the BIOS ID of all volumes. The BIOS, of course, can’t possibly know about the presence of the virtual partition, which is really just a file hanging out somewhere on your hard drive.

 

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