I am really pleased with the new features. In the installer, install EFI. I think it’s worthwhile for Haiku to have its own boot manager for EFI. Grub and Limine and rEFInd don’t seem to be cutting it. I need an MBR drive for FreeDOS and a separate 32 bit Haiku installation, and haven’t been able to chainload it from Grub, limine, or rEFInd. The lack of functionality is not great, as well as the fact that it isn’t nearly as pretty of a solution as bootman.
I have been having a hell of a time getting a solution for what I want for booting. My setup involves 3 drives, but 2 drives would be the same issue.
1: Regular windows drive
2: Drive with EFI partition, that boots Haiku64, some Linux distros
3: MBR drive for Haiku 32-bit, FreeDOS, and Slackware
I haven’t been able to use a single boot manager to boot both the EFI files, and also the MBR of the other drive. I don’t want to have to repeatedly Pres the motherboard boot menu key to make this work.
What would it take to have the simple, colorful, haiku bootman work for EFI? It’s a lot nicer than other options, and it’s kind of silly that I can’t customize the other ones to perform this task.
BIOS-MBR boot (FreeDOS) and EFI boot (rEFInd) always need a switch between Legacy BIOS and EFI in the firmware boot menu, at least on my CSM PC (Dell). Booting two different EFI OSs from one rEFInd menu is possible.
While I still think Haiku should have its own EFI bootman, I was able to get something working with rEFInd. I just used version 12 instead of 14.whatever. It detected the legacy boot drive, so it can boot my EFI operating systems or the Haiku bootman living in secondary drives MBR from 1 fairly simple (while ugly) menu.
The bootloader/bootmanager has limited resources and is a small and simple program. Its job is to load the kernel. It’s not its job to be pretty. But people keep complaining about the look of the bootmanager.
I think I did install that theme on a different computer. With the same desktop blue background. Thanks for the reminder.
I did try text mode, but it froze because I was also trying to have it see the legacy boot disk. Now that the older version appears to work, I’ll test that again too.
I don’t have any complaints about the look of Haiku’s boot manager. I just wish it would work with EFI options, and multiple drives.
The boot loader (the thing where you can enter safe mode options) is fine too. I do seem to have this problem where if I have multiple Haiku installations (32 and 64 bit) the boot loader (safe mode options etc.) will come up. I don’t want it to.
They both work. It behaves as if I pressed Shift or Space on booting, and brings up the boot options. Continue booting is greyed out until I go into the disk selection and select one.
I have a 32 and 64 bit install. I only want the 64 bit to boot this way, is there a way to skip this or set the default? The installs are on separate drives.
It does seem similar, but it only happens when I have the other install. I remove the 32 bit install and partition (accidentally) and Haiku 64-bit booted from rEFInd without coming up with that selection menu.
let’s say my setup was simpler. If I had 2 drives, each Haiku only, and tried to boot from 1 drive, would it stop booting to bring me to the bootloader, and make me select a boot disk before I can continue booting? If so, how to I get around that.
This has nothing to do with it “working” after you explicitly selected a partition, if the partition is formatted a BFS The boot loader will consider it for the menu, but it will only consider it for booting when it also has the correct GPT partiton identifier
I don’t know. It automatically detects the Haiku installation on the GPT disk and on the MBR formatted disk. Both installs were according to regular instructions with regards to partitioning and formatting.
it detects the MBR install, and makes me pick one every time while it’s there. It would be nice if I didn’t have to do that, I didn’t see anything in the kernel file or user boot script that would help.
Currently there’s no way to force the bootloader to pick automatically one of the installations. I’m going to add the support for that, but I’m pretty busy atm and will be able to look into it next month the earliest.
That amazing. Youre busy at the moment with multi drive bootman, EFI bootman, and BeOS app support for 64-bit Haiku I’m guessing? Shouldn’t take you too long
Well now that I know there is currently no solution, I will be patient and leave it in your capable hands.
