ThinkPad A31 and BeOS (Or Zeta)

[eightbit]

Hi everybody,

First post here and hopefully many more

Recently I happened upon a somewhat sick A31. Broken power port, broken (but still working) USB ports, and a dead CD drive. This is my first ever ThinkPad. I am 50 years old now, but when this was available I was in my 20's with a child and could never afford one...but always wanted one!

So, I replaced the power port, couldn't replace the USB ports as I could not source that part, and replaced the dead CD drive with a new old stock DVD-RW. And, I replaced the thermal paste and gave it a clean.

It works perfectly fine...in Windows XP that is. No issues at all and I have been using it for days here. However, I really wanted to run BeOS R5 on this as I haven't been able to source hardware to get it to function 100% for years. And, to my amazement it works! Using BeOS Max 4b1 the video driver and audio drivers are there and it comes right up, runs fast and runs great. But, only for a few minutes. Randomly whether doing something or doing nothing it will hard freeze. I then tried Zeta v1.21 and the same thing happens there. It just randomly freezes, everything locked up.

I have tried a bariety of things from turning off DMA in safe mode, updating the BIOS on this to v1.10 (it is a 1N board) and turning off all power management features. But, no matter what I do, it just teases you with a great running BeOS until it freezes.

I also tried removing 512MB of the RAM (it has 1GB) since I heard BeOS does not like lots of RAM, but that did not change a thing.

I am not very hopeful that I will find anyone who is trying to run BeOS on this old beast and knows what this is, but I figured I would throw it out there. I'd love to run some of my BeOS software again!