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?
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.