I am a Mac user from way back in 1984 and I remember seeing BeOS for the first time and thinking wow this is fantastic! Then it faded away, what a shame.
I wished that Apple would have bought it instead of NEXT, but I understand why they went with the more established solution.
I love what you are doing here, so I have chipped into the collection and now downloaded the Haiku anyboot.
Any advice on what to do with it?
I have some older PowerPC Macs, 2 PCs and several recent Macs.
I also have 4 spare 2 Gb Hard Drives that I was thinking of installing in the latest PC and making it a multi-boot computer.
Is there a way I can set up Haiku on one of the hard drives and selectively boot up on that from start-up?
Pardon the naïve question but I have never done this before.
I really would like to turn the PC into a testbed using each separate hard drives to run a different OS: Haiku, 2 flavors of Linux, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
It has Windows 7 on it already.
I am happy to set up a hard drive to run from one of my Macs as well but don’t know how GRUB will work. Best I use VirtualBox? I don’t like working Virtually as that is not the full experience of an OS.
This is a blank slate so any advice or experience is welcome.
Haiku itself doesn't need a huge partition. Especially if you're not building Haiku itself. I run Haiku on a 2GB partition perfectly fine (I use another partition for all my building). I also have a 2GB USB stick with two alternate Haiku installs on it (gcc4h, x86_64) for when I'm building packages for the other architectures.
And my 120GB SSD hosts an 80GB Windows 8.1 install, a 10GB Ubuntu Server install (space is a bit tight when building Haiku stuff though), a 2GB Haiku install (gcc2h), and an 18GB Haiku data partition.
So on a 2TB disk, you'll have plenty of space.
I personally use a GPT formatted disk, and EFI bootloader for all my non-Haiku installs (Windows, Ubuntu), and use refind for the boot loader. I then use the system boot menu to boot my Haiku install.
This requires a special GPT-aware Haiku MBR though; I have one that's working, if you're comfortable dd'ing an MBR to your disk and the potential for it to brick everything!
You'll also want to use gdisk/gptdisk to create the Haiku partition. This should already include support for the Haiku GPT identifiers; this is needed for the GPT-aware MBR to find the Haiku partition.
In case this does brick your EFI partition table, you can boot from linux media, and use parted to recover it. Just use it to rename an existing partition entry. It should be able to use the recovery GPT to rebuild the partition table. Renaming an existing partition will then let it write the recovered GPT to disk, restoring all of your partitions.
You should also be able to use the makebootabletiny executable on Linux to let Haiku boot from the GPT partition.
I would advise you to use grub (the linux boot manager) to boot all your OSes. Start by installing windows, then linux, then haiku. After linux is installed it will create a bootloader that brings up a menu at boot asking which OS to start, and this should already include windows. After you install haiku, boot linux and then follow the steps (probably for grub 2) here https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/booting/bootmanagers to add haiku to the boot menu.
