Bootable Images (ISO) do not work in Parallels on Mac

I decided to take another look at Haiku after being away for other business. I decided to to download the latest nightly X64 build and guess: NO boot. Parallels desktop can’t use the nightly image, because the downloaded image does not contain something bootable.

I used to run Haiku on Parallels before but that was a previous version of parallels. Parallels can read the diverse Windows and Linux ISO’s I use, but somehow: the Haiku ISO seems non functional. Any ideas whats going on?

Have you unzipped it?

yup! Otherwise I wouldn’t be looking at the ISO, unless the ISO file itself is also a zip file.

Did you follow the guide at https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing/parallels-desktop ?

Nope. Figured that ISO would work since they are supposed to be ISO file systems. Will give this a try.
Thanks!

Does audio work in Parallels? I had a play with Haiku in Veertu Desktop and discovered audio doesn’t work there.

Yes it does, just like the network.
There are some downsides with this method though:

  1. booting takes a full minute
  2. if you just follow the article, your using an almost full disk so you can play with it but there isn’t much space left for storing other stuff

My advice: install a second disk, partition it, format it, install Haiku on it and then remove the HD image used for installing.

At the same time: wouldn’t it be wise to make the ISO a real iso image that can boot without workarounds?

The image is a real CD image. You can burn it on a CD and it will boot just fine. It contains a small ISO9660 filesystem with everything required to boot (conforming to “el torrito” specification). It also contains other things (namely a BFS partition) but that should not interfere.

It just happens that our drivers are currently incompatible with the CD drive emulation in Parallels (this problem is apparently https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/4502 and also affects real hardware). The workaround is to make Parallels think it is not booting from a CD, but from an hard disk (which our anyboot image can also do, it has an MBR and partition table for that).

Slightly modernising this topic. Parallels 14 can boot from the current release ISO (32 bit & 64 bit) but hangs at memory (chip), even with 4 GB ram and 16 GB. Parallels 14 does recognise the 32 & 64 bits iso image as a HDD image if renamed and manually added.

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There is no R1 yet.

Virtual box has sound and network. But the graphics are painfully slow compared to Veertu.