If the following line from the “Booting Haiku” page has not changed since I started this thread (Sept. 30), I need to slap myself:
search --fs-uuid --set=root <your-efi-partition-uuid>
The quoted text above could not really be any more clear about which partition is to be set as root.
All these years I have been using Ubuntu and never realized that it mounts the EFI partition at /boot, so when I copied the files from the EFI partition on the flash drive, I was actually copying them to the system EFI partition! That is why one has to be “su” to actually succesfully copy the files!
I would like to suggest that the “Booting Haiku” page be rearranged so that under the heading “Configuring GRUB boot manager”, one section would be for legacy systems and one for EFI systems. Under the heading for legacy systems the example partition layout would apply to both grub legacy and grub2 as shown below:
hd0 – first hard drivehd0,1 – first partition of first drive (sda1) Ubuntu Linux /
hd0,2 – second partition of first drive (sda2) Ubuntu Linux Swap
hd0,3 – third partition of first drive (sda3) Haiku partition
The second section under the heading “Configuring GRUB boot manager” would then be for EFI systems with a disk layout as shown below or similar:
hd0 – first hard driveThis I think would better clarify the difference between legacy systems using the MBR partitioning layout and EFI systems using the GPT partioning layout.hd0,1 – first partition of first drive (sda1) EFI system partition
hd0,2 – second partition of first drive (sda2) Microsoft reserved partition
hd0,3 – third partition of first drive (sda3) Windows system partition
…
hd0,n - nth partition of first drive (sda"n") Haiku partition
Additionally, I recently used a laptop (Dell) which allowed the user to select the desired OS from a list on boot up, by pressing one of the function keys during the POST. This laptop doesn’t really need a boot loader to be able to choose which OS to boot, since the setup screen also allows users to choose which one of the EFI entries to boot as default. This particular laptop has what I consider to be the correct implimetation of EFI and such systems would have a completely different approach, since the ability to choose boot loaders is built into the firmware.
Maybe a little write up on how to set up such systems would help. My guess is that to set up such systems, one would have to mount the EFI system partition after running the installer, create a folder for Haiku and copy Haiku’s EFI loder to it. Ultimately the installer should do it automatically, since the business of having users mounting the EFI sytem partition and writing stuff to it is very risky.