Haiku Boot Manager hangs

That would be great. How should it be done? Submitting ticket?

Are you talking about BootManager? I use it on USB all the time. It just has two limitaions. No efi and it can only boot partitions on the physical drive it is installed on. As far as EFI, you should be able to do an EFI boot from any supported device (Not BootManager). EFI is present by default in the Anyboot images at least.

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Port Grub to Haiku. This isn’t a Haiku issue. Submit ticket to HaikuPorts on GitHub.

Ports are handled by HaikuPorts. Haiku is only the base system. Having grub is not an issue with the base system.

It should boot from USB as well, but I think the installer provided with it does not support putting it on an USB disk? Not sure, it’s been a while since I used it.

No, about smart boot manager. See link above from PulkoMandy

Ah. Smart boot manager seems to predate USB. At least the documentation hasn’t been updated. It references lilo and not GrUB when talking about Linux.

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Yes, Haiku’s BootManager is for all intents and purposes “deprecated”; we don’t intend to do much more work on it, as EFI will be the main bootloader going forward (including on non-x86 platforms, e.g. ARM.)

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@Evgen you can try with the instructions given in this other thread on how to dualboot haiku with windows, i understand you have winxp installed on the other HDD? EasyBCD can be installed on winxp too.
Good luck.

Thank you for a link. This use to had a Windows XP on that little Siliconmotion SSD and Windows 7 on Hitachi HDD. XP no longer boots (disk is full) and Win 7 I wiped out entirely to install Haiku

Ok! Done!


Thanks to everyone who tried to help.
After a tedious search I have found this
OSL2000 Multiboot Manager
I have downloaded it’s installer and run it on separate Win8 machine.
Of course, I don’t need boot manager on this Win8 machine, so I simply closed it. But, installer generated directory called C:\OSL2000 with DOS executable (DOSINST.EXE) inside. On my unbootable Haiku machine I have installed FreeDos. on SSD. Then I copied via USB that entire OSL2000 directory from Win8 machine to Haiku machine on SSD. Then I ran DOSINST.EXE inside and rebooted Haiku machine. All done. OSL2000 bootloader sat exactly where Haiku Bootloader was and replaced it’s boot menu, so now I don’t need USB stick with GRUB2 to boot Haiku.

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Just wondering now that you have a safe way to boot Haiku…
couldnt you just use a live linux distro and install grub2 to one of your disks, so you still have grub2 on boot from the bios, without usb?

Yes, I know it can be done via grub2. I have tried one Ubuntu-based live distro, live rescue CD and one or two other. The annoying problem with them was all of them I tried is screwing synchronization of flat panel monitor, connected to machine via VGA port, in the middle of booting. To tackle that I tried some boot options like selecting video mode. It did help, but then, when X server and XFCE got running the fonts and texts were so small, so the whole GUI became unreadable. I should try tried text based distros like Slackware, I guess, but my expertise in linuxes is pretty low, though.
I, nevertheless, believe it would be better that Haiku Bootman can boot Haiku even if it’s installed on another device.

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Bootman itself can, we’re just missing some support in the installation program. This ticket has been pending for years, the analysis of the missing feature is pretty clear and it may even be not that hard to implement. But somehow it never gets done :frowning:

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I’ll look into this. Sounds like it might be a good follow up project to the terminal argument. This is one of those things that has been bugging me. I swear BeOS used to use BootMan across devices.

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I swear BeOS used to use BootMan across devices.

Yes, it did!

And if you got our installer to compile and run on BeOS, it would there too.
I already linked the ticket with all the details (carefully read all the comments). Here it is again in case it was missed:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/3545

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Yup. Found that ticket. Tl’dr for breakfast time. Will read up later.

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Hello, waddlesplash,

In latest (at least) nightly build links to Bebook and User Guide
are broken. Is it normal? Should I submit a ticket?

Cheers

BeBook and User guide are only included in the release images to save space.

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Like humdinger said. Also, you can install them optionally through HaikuDepot.

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Hi,
A little update - the FreeBSD bootloader is capable to boot Haiku from another device. I booted machine via USB with live-FreeBSD and from command prompt just ran
boot0cfg -B ada1
and that was enough and I got boot menu after restart.
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=boot0cfg&sektion=8&manpath=freebsd-release-ports

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