Can I access my old Haiku somehow?

Help
1

Hello all.

I changed the HDD that I was using because it started showing S.M.A.R.T errors so I was a bit concerned it was going to fail sooner rather than later.

I assumed that cloning the drive using dd in Linux was going to be enough to transfer all the information and the partitions. It was. However, the new SSD is bigger than the old HDD so I ended up with one quarter of the drive being unallocated.

I didn’t think much of that as I assumed I could simply create an extra partition to be used for storage, but what I failed to realise was that in old BIOS mode a drive can’t have more than 4 primary partition, any extra can only be inside an extended partition. Then I thought oh well, I will append this one to the one that Linux created but I couldn’t do it easily because the unallocated space was not contiguous to the Linux partition.

So I moved the partitions until I aligned the space and then created an EXFAT partition to be shared between all the OSs but then only Linux could boot.

I reinstalled Win 7 and fought to get back my old Haiku to no avail. I kept getting an error about a missing boot.

I reinstalled Haiku, fixed grub so I can again select what OS to use, but now I have to go through the whole personalisation.

Because of dd the UUID of all the partitions is the same so th computer does not want to see the old install when connected via an USB caddy.

Is there a way to access my old install to transfer it? The file explorers only see a few folders but not as many as in the current running Haiku. I did get the warning that I would lose my programs when I overwrote the partition with a new install.

Is my best bet to swap drives again, install my Haiku to an USB and then install from there again to the SSD?

I can redo all my customisations but I’m trying to understand Haiku, my options and what is and isn’t possible.

Thanks.

1 Like
2

You could try changing the UUID of the usb disk from linux, and then looking in the “new” Haiku it it works then.

3

That is normal. Most of the Haiku filesystem is virtual files and directories that only get mounted when the system is booted off of that disk.

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4

I thought about doing that but wanted to check before making changes that may render the old installation unusable.

I will try to install to USB and then I can start playing with changing the UUID. It is a bit more involved than I thought because of the partitions. It gets a bit convoluted to try to identify the Haiku partition.

I was about to change it last night but I was not sure how many characters I needed to genereate. Then I compared it with my active one and I think it is 16.

5

I imagined that was the case

6

So I reinstalled the drive in the PC, installed my old Haiku to USB (which in hindsight I should have done beforehand) and then reinstalled to the SSD.

Now that I am happy it is safe I can start messing up with the HDD to see if changing the UUID would give me access back to it.