Upgrading from DR8 or earlier

Situation:

The BeBox was *gasp* ignored for the last 2 years. Now that Release 4.5 is out and you're willing to give the BeBox another shot, you need to boot and get running, but the CD is completely invisible to the bootrom and to DR8 or earlier. Whats worse, the familiar bootrom update floppy is not shipped any more.

Preview Release (and to a certain point Advanced Access, the precursor to PR) moved the BeOS to the new bfs disk format. DR8 and less doesn't know how to read the newer disk format, so the bfs CD is ignored as a non-bootable drive. The bootrom image is now on the CD, but because you can't boot, you can't see it. Chicken and the egg, right?

Things to try:

The Bootrom update was shipped with Preview Release and Preview Release 2, so dig these out of the closet to use them. These let you boot from bfs volumes to continue the boot process. If you lost them, you can download the BeBox 3.2 bootrom floppy and write it to disk, as explained in the text in that directory.

To update to the Release 4 bootrom after this, follow the instructions in Appendix C of the manual.