I managed to get my new hard drive installed this weekend - hooray!
A few minor bumps. The instructions for installing the BIOS were fine until it said, "clear the CMOS". It didn't tell me how, but my Tyan handbook did. Seemed kinda low tech - "move jumper to pins 2 & 3. Wait 10 seconds. Move jumper back to pins 1 & 2". I just nod my head and say, "ok, uh, whatever". It works.
I started with Windows 98, since I remember that Windows 98 doesn't know how to install on a particular partition - it wants the whole disk or nothing. After that Beos!
The new drive is noticeably faster (7200 rpm vs 5400 rpm). In Beos, the boot time from hitting the boot sector until I hear the music is 16 seconds.
I won't be doing any Perl development in BeOS, though. No sockets, no Errno - no point.
I'm gonna wait a month or so to install Linux - I heard both Suse and Mandrake are coming out with new releases soon, so I'll make up my mind then.
