Could not find boot partition

Is there any place where I can find documentation on haiku loader aside Boot Loader ?

I divided a Windows partition in two recently and since then haikuloader started complaining that it can’t find boot partition and it has to scan the disk. That forces me to manually select disk and state from which to boot the os every time I boot. Which is fairly unconvenient. But it’s unclear how or where I could set the correct hint what is the Haiku partition so that it doesn’t have rescan them on every boot.

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Hello,

If you use BIOS for booting, make sure your Haiku partition is marked as active in the partition table, and its type set to BFS (or BeFS, depending on the tool you use to check this).

In Haiku DriveSetup this can be done in the right click menu on the partition → Change parameters.

That’s interesting, the partition is actually set as “Windows Data”, but if I try to change that to BeOs File System it fails with “Error: Operation not supported”

That’s DriveSetup on Haiku itself

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For anyone interested, setting the partition type correctly actually did the trick. Haikuloader now correctly boots without having to manually choose the partition.

I took the partition GUID from haiku/gpt_known_guids.h at 8f16317a5b6db5c672f331814273e5857555020f · haiku/haiku · GitHub and used DISKPART on windows to set the partition type id ( select partition X and then set id=X ).

The GUID is formatted slightly differently in Haiku codebase as it’s divided in 4 chunks, while diskpart wants it in 5 chunks, but it’s as easy as adding the extra dash ( 42465331-3BA3-10F1-802A-4861696B7521 )

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Hi javanx
Thanks for that, it helped me out, I can now boot straight into Haiku without manually selecting a state. I have rEFInd installed on my laptop.

I don’t dual boot with Windows and I didn’t want to lose my Haiku setup.

  1. booted into Haiku (manually selecting the latest state)
  2. used DriveSetup to create a new partition and format it as Be File System
  3. used Installer to copy my current setup onto the new partition
  4. rebooted the system, rEFInd booted correctly into my new partition

When I was sure everything was working well I deleted the original haiku partition.

Thanks

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Well, I used Windows+Diskpart just because I had that already available. You can do the same exact thing using GDisk on Linux. If you don’t have an installed Linux partition, you probably can use a LiveCD

This sounds like a bug we should fix. Is there a ticket about this yet?

It depends if it was booting from another media to attempt the modification or not. If not, that’s logical. I don’t think that any partition manager allows to change the type of a mounted partition, moreover when it is the one you booted on.