Frustrated by the size of the 500MB partition size limitation in BeOS 5 Personal Edtion? There are several ways to overcome it and get PE onto a full size partition. The easiest way is probably to create a BeOS installation CD out of the raw image.be file. If you don’t have a CD burner, read on.
First of all, you’ll need a blank partition somewhere on your system. This could be an empty D: drive, for example, or blank space you’ve created with fdisk or PartitionMagic or Be’s own DriveSetup. Make sure this partition is at least 2*AmountOfRAM+200MBs.
Install PE normally, from within Windows. Then boot into BeOS and launch the Installer application. Installer has the amazing ability to install BeOS from any existing BeOS installation to any blank BFS partition. Use the Installer’s options to select the From: volume (your Personal Edition installation) and To: volume (your blank partition). Allow the Installer to initialize the volume with a block size of 1024 (remember, this will destroy all data on the partition!) and let ‚er rip. A few minutes later, you’ll have two complete BeOS installations.
Now you’ll want to give yourself a boot menu, so you can select an operating system at boot time rather than going through Windows. Installer should offer to install Bootman when installation is done — this is highly recommended for easiest booting. See also Modify bootman after the fact .
Once you’re sure everything is safely up and running, you can even uninstall PE from within Windows, and your full size partition will still run just fine.