If you’re running BeOS Personal Edition and need more than 500MBs to play with, there are a couple of interesting techniques you can use, either for creating a larger BeOS boot partition or just for getting yourself some additional storage space. Use these tricks at your own risk (though there’s no reason they shouldn’t work).
Be’s Travis Geiselbrecht (author of the virtual filesystem driver), offers this tip on creating additional virtual filesystems. This technique assumes that you have your existing Personal Edition installed on C: and that you want to create an additional virtual volume sitting in your D: drive or other drive letter (since there can only be one eosimage.be file per disk volume):

Well, you could go to 95/98, NT, or linux, create a file called ‚image.be‘ in a directory ‚beos‘ (case is important on NTFS and ext2) off of the root of the volume. Make it as big as you want. Create it however you want, the data inside it will be blown away soon. You could, for example, write a little program to build the file if you’re a developer, or do something like create a big .zip file and rename it image.be. [Under Linux you can do this with dd. -ed.]
When you reboot into BeOS, you should see another virtual drive in DriveSetup. The ‚Map Style‘ column should read something like „unknown. “ Then, select the drive, goto Setup | Partition | Intel and create a big partition or however you want it. Then, you can initialize it as BFS and you’re set.

Isen Kusima (cycnuskus at hotmail.com) offers this technique:
Assuming that you already have installed BeOS R5 Personal Edition in Win9x, WinNT, or Win2000, and that you have a hard drive with more than 1GB unused:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/[YourHardDrive]/beos/new.img bs=1024k count=1000
$ mkbfs 2048 /[YourHardDrive]/beos/new.img COPY-TO-HERE
$ sync
 

$ mkdir /mnt
$ mount -t bfs new.img /mnt