[KMag]

Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k, BeOS and QNX)

Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or maybe I just didn't risk burning a coaster. (Remember those days where you had to worry about your OS not being able to feed the CD burner as fast as it was writing?) When I demoed BeOS around 2000, it was on a floppy (I repurposed a free AoL floppy from a few years earlier... by that time AoL was mailing free CDs instead of free floppies). The demo floppy allowed one to format a BeFS partition on the drive, and I think even put the kernel on the drive, but kept the bootloader on the floppy to encourage purchase.

I woke up one morning to see the floppy drive light on, and apparently a BeOS kernel or usespace driver bug caused it to spin the floppy continuously all night without moving the read/write head. I popped out the floppy and pulled back the dust guard to discover a thin stripe where the magnetic media had been polished off of the floppy. The drive didn't read any floppy correctly after that; presumably the read/write head was covered in magnetic media dust.

I don't remember how, but I eventually found instructions for copying the bootloader off of the downloaded floppy image and getting GRUB to find it, so I didn't need to put my replacement floppy drive at risk.