Boot loader for HAIKU

The GAG graphical boot manager recognizes HAIKU. http://gag.sourceforge.net/

For dual booting Linux OS’s grub needs to be installed on the partition that the OS resides on. There are installation instructions with the package download. BSD and Solaris OS’s are chainloaded in the same way as HAIKU and are recognized by GAG without further configuring.

I’ve had problems with GAG on an all-Haiku system, though. GAG reports installing itself succesfully, but doesn’t actually boot. I guess that it managed to get into the MBR, but all the rest of GAG has to go somewhere, and it is not finding a suitable partition to hide itself on. I’ll try XOSL next.

try installing GAG on a floppy, perhaps with another computer (windoze, mac or linux…doesn’t matter) then boot from the floppy. after adding the HAIKU installation there will be an option to “save to hard drive”. GAG should boot from the hard drive after that.

Yeah, i don’t like heavy boot loaders that require more than the MBR :slight_smile:

That’s why I like Haiku’s bootman - it can chainload GRUB installed on the linux partition as well as Windows XP, etc. It all fits in MBR, but you must configure and install it from within Haiku.

With GAG installed only in the MBR it will boot HAIKU as well as any chainloaded OS without any additional files needing to be installed. Its also well documented, so I thought it would be of interest to anyone having difficulty in getting HAIKU to boot. If your already having success with your boot loader, maybe you could post a how-to.

Symantec’s Bootmagic (part of Partitionmagic) can also be used, at least version 8.0.
It sees Haiku initially as QNX, but that’s just a label that can be edited.

Haiku comes with its own bootloader, /boot/system/bin/bootman . This will set up to chaniload any os. linux needs grub installed on the boot partition. The limiting factor is that bootman only boots partitions for the first hard disk.

From a terminal type: bootman