I just found some BeOS versions on my computer and was wondering if it was possible to install them in Virtual PC software.
I have:
3.1
4.0
4.5
5.0 Personal
5.0 Professional
Installation of any of these possible?

Yes. You just have to partition the drive before running the BeOS installer.

i have the same problem with BeOS (both 5 Professional and Exp/Dano) on VirtualBox/Qemu. When you enable console debugging mode
you will see that it has some problems with the disk controller, so that it couldn't find the CD-ROM and thus spying out
the error message that it couldn't find the CD-ROM.

Maybe there's a workaround using BeOS4Linux, found this site: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/388.

With regards,
Martin

I haven't dealt with it in a while, but BeOS is hard to get working in in a virtual machine. One thing I do know from running the kernel debugger is, during boot, it reads some CPU registers (or IO port value) that, on a real machine have some magic value that isn't documented (or should be used). In a virtual machine, the value it tries to read is initialized properly, so BeOS fails to boot.

It has been many versions since I have done this, so MAYBE some VM software works better. However, another caveat that I know about is the mouse timing. The way BeOS polled the PS/2 mouse, the sync is off. There is a handful of VMWare configuration lines to fix the timing.

The furthest boot I got, required a patched kernel for the IDE controller (http://haikuware.com/directory/view-det ... collection). Most apps crashed and burned. net_server would always hang. No network card driver.

BeOS R5 and R4.5 at least work fine in VMware Workstation vers 5-7. I haven't tried those vms in 8 yet but I wouldn't expect any problems. I've installed both R4.5 and R5 directly in vmware, though I also use to use raw disk access to boot R5.0.3 directly off a multiboot setup on a laptop.

You just have to select Linux->Other linux.
(I successfully installed HaikuOS(Based on BeOS))