I want to try Haiku but I am not able to even get it installed.
I have a Dell Studio Hybrid which has Win 10 ultimate installed.
I would like to have a dual boot situation with Haiku but I am not able to get anywhere with it.
The PC does not have UEFI, but plain old BIOS. I have created a BFS partition using a linux live USB using then fdisk and mkfs.
Linux then sees the partition when I do a fdisk -l
Then I restart the computer using the Haiku USB. It starts and gets into the installer but when I select install it does not see the partition. As a matter of fact it sees the 500gb drive as empty so it does not see the windows partition, nor the BFS partition created using the Linux live USB.
What am I doing wrong please? Is there a partitioning tool that can see the windows partition and respect it and then create or activate the BFS partition?
I hope someone can help me as I really want to try haiku in this computer but I also want to keep the original OS if only for collecting purposes.
You can indeed create your partition with fdisk but as @scott_puopolo18 says you may have to change for the right type.
Perhaps I’m wrong but, I think that since the bfs module in the kernel doesn’t allow writing, mkfs can’t work with a bfs partition.
What happen if you boot to the desktop on your USB key? Does it see Windows partitions then?
Haiku wants to create the partition over the windows one. It sees the hard drive as an empty space and does not allow to create the partition offset from the beginning of the disk like for example Gparted does.
@Starcrasher If I go to the Haiku Desktop it still does not see the partitions. It detects the hard drive as a single empty volume.
I tried creating the extra partition as FAT32, NTSC, BTS (With fdisk and mkfs using the linux live USB). Nothing.
Haiku just does not see the partitions.
I am not sure if if has to do with the system being BIOS and not UEFI, or what.
I am so confused by the issue.
For a while I even broke the windows boot by creating the extra partition as fat32 and flagging it as Boot. Not even then Haiku saw it.
Also. The Haiku USB acts kind of strange. It seems to have some sort of persistency.
If I close the installer and move things around. When I restart it does not automatically go to the installer but straight to Desktop and then I have to search in the apps for the installers if I want to try to install again.
I created it with Rufus. Theres is a message in Rufus that it has to be written in dd mode. MAybe it jas to do with it?
This is normal for Haiku, the usb is both a live system and an installer.
To debug your problem further, I think we need to take a look at the syslog (/var/log/syslog) where there will be insormation about what our partitions detection code didn’t like about your hard disk. It may be using some strange format that we don’t understand?
It seems that Haiku has trouble to read the partition scheme on this disk.
Perhaps is it confused by the fact it is using GPT partition scheme on a non UEFI BIOS? Anyway, as @PulkoMandy said, the syslog can give us more informations. To retrieve it, once you have boot to the desktop, the file is located in /boot/system/var/log It is a simple text file so if you click on it, it will open in StyledEdit.
I found these infos about your disk, if it can help. It raises a question What size does windows report for it?
Why would it be confused by that? These are completely independant things. If you install the haiku_extras package, you can also use legacy Mac OS or Amiga partition tables if you want (I’m not sure why you would want to do that, but you can).
I am not sure what was going on with the original system installation as I just got that computer yesterday and I thought it was a perfect candidate for Haiku.
To avoid getting even more tangled with the partition table I just threw in a different drive.
I had issues then not being able to add Haiku’s bootloader ot Grub to start the system so I checked and the partition table was not intel partition map (or something like that)
So I formatted once more. Created that, partitioned from Haiku USB and installed it first.
I was able to boot, and install Haiku bootloader but Haiku runs very badly.
The system I use has an Intel core 2 duo T5850 2.2 GHz with 4Gb of DDR2 600 Ram and a 7200rpm 750Gb WDBPKT. So not a powerhouse but a bit above Haiku’s requirements so I can’t understand why it is so laggy and choppy.
The monitor graph in Haiku’s toolbar always shows as if one of the cores was working overtime and the system monitor confirms that it just shoots up to 100% quite often, with the spikes becoming flat at 100 at times.
I am in the process of installing again a linux distro so I can boot to the three partitions to compare but so far even win 7 seems to be managing better the limited resources of the computer.
I still hope I can resolve it because I want to use this computer with Haiku as my Shed PC.
I have about the same hardware : CPU T5850, 3GB RAM, GPU i965. Haiku x86_64 is installed alone on 128GB SSD and it runs very well. No problem, except with Iceweasel (huge cpu load).
So, IMO, you can keep this hardware to play with Haiku. Your problem is not due to an undersized computer.
