Hello…
Is there a way to make the Haiku boot loader install to the hard disk? I tried selecting the option during install to write the boot loader to disk, but it doesn’t seem to work. Am I doomed to booting off the CD first or is there a fix in the works?
Guru
Haiku does have a BootManager, when you boot Haiku from the live CD, access the Terminal and type “bootman” (without quotes). This will start up a GUI program which can write a classic boot manager to your hard disk, with several configuration options. When you boot your PC, the manager presents a simple menu to select the partition to boot from.
However, at this point in time most Haiku users also have Linux installed, and prefer to use GRUB to boot Haiku (I’m NOT one of these users). It’s simpler for these users to add Haiku to grubs boot menu.
The Alpha release is really intended for developers at this point in time, so I guess that there was a reason why the developers chose not to present the BootManager configuration program to end users. This is a dangerous tool, and if used incorrectly can make booting your other Operating Systems a bit more difficult. If you know what your doing, typing “bootman” from the Terminal gets you a classic Boot Manager.
PS - the Haiku Installer option labelled “Write Boot Sector” (or similar, cannot remember the exact wording) has actually changed the text label after the Alpha was released. Several people were confused with what that option actually did. All it does is mark a Haiku partition as “bootable”, hence you can boot from it. You still have to select that partition using another tool. The buttons purpose on the Alpha CD is really to repair the Haiku partition marker if it gets altered by some other external tool.
Good luck.
The Bootloader has an unload Bootmanager as well. Works well. I tried it on my triple OS bootup. Loaded Bootmanager and then unloaded it. No probs.
If you mean that you want to use your entire hard drive and then haiku to boot automatically from that, you can install haiku normally, but DON’T press the “Write Boot Sector” button.
When you restart and take out the CD, haiku should load automatically.
If you want to boot with other operating systems, do what the above have said.
The “Write Boot Sector” button on the installer is used to repair the boot block of the partition, not the MBR on the disk.
If you do an install, it writes the boot sector anyway, so the button is just an additional feature if you want to fix the boot sector without reinstalling.
AFAIK, there is no way to install a normal chainloading bootloader from the installer or drivesetup currently, although I could be wrong, the only one I know of is bootman.
There’s an easy-to-use boot manager out there called GAG (http://gag.sourceforge.net/). You could just install GAG and since it’s easy to configure and independent of OS You could go on from there.