Haiku Beta1 boot problem on iMac7,1

Help
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Hi all, it’s great to be a member of the forums after many years following silently Haiku progress.

I managed to install beta 1 (64) on an old iMac 20’’ after burning the image to DVD. Couldn’t boot from USB.
Partition layout is: EFI partition, MacOS partition and then Haiku. I have refind installed. I followed the guide for EFI booting and copied the EFI boot loader (from the link on the guide page). This is the full path: EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.

Refind recognizes directly the Haiku partition but cannot boot it. Also recognizes Haiku EFI boot loader and loads it but I get blank screen. Trying to get on Haiku EFI boot manager options screen I see that it lists the Haiku partition to boot from but it cannot boot it, just stays there. Trying to select other options doesn’t seem to help.
Also experimenting blessing directly the Haiku EFI boot loader and not passing through refind which ended up on the same behavior.

To verify that Haiku partition on disk is OK I tried to boot it from DVD’s boot manager (without changing any options) and I succeeded !
I thought of trying to grub the EFI boot loader from the DVD but Haiku itself cannot mount the EFI FAT32 partition (too small?) which I think is a known problem?

I read multiple times the boot (and EFI boot) guides on the site but can’t understand what is wrong. Why DVD’s boot loader is able to boot Haiku from disk and the on-disk one cannot? Are they different?

Will continue troubleshooting but thought of asking…

As a side note I have successfully installed previous versions and Beta1 (always 64 bit) on another PC laptop and works OK. Also in the past dual booting with Ubuntu and booting Haiku from grub2. But it’s not an EFI system.

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
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Hi! I have been through a somewhat similar experience with my MacBook Pro from 2007. I am not sure that rEFInd plays well with the Haiku EFI bootloader. My workaround is similar to yours, but since I don’t have a DVD drive anymore on this Mac, I had to dump the install disk image into my secondary SSD. I still have some trouble to boot every now and then, but after a few tries (and a couple minutes lost) it boots and works fine.

Somebody around here suggested at some point that installing a nightly build could be easier because of some EFI issue on the beta, but I am not sure if it solves this kind of problems.

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Thanks a lot Victor!
I remember reading your thread searching for a solution…
My current understanding is that something is wrong with the Haiku EFI boot loader on the disk.
I think I have nothing to loose to try a new nightly build :slight_smile:
I want desperately to make it work on this Mac because I do have working sound!! If only through the line out but that’s enough for me.

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Just make sure you have a complete backup of everything :wink: