Hello all, I am attempting to install Haiku onto a laptop (NP Notebook 2000 if you want to know), and it seems that regardless of the location of where I want the OS to be installed, it seems to install on the flash drive that I mounted / flashed the installer to. Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated!
Edit: my situation seems starkly different from what I thought. It isn’t installing in the flash drive, the installation is failing and it’s just booting into the flash drives “portable haiku” of sorts. In the Tools menu of the installer, and Set Up Boot Menu, it says the drive is “Incompatible for format!”
During the installation and partitioning process, is Haiku seeing the drive you are attempting to install to? Currrently, Haiku does not support eMMC drives. (edit: it doesn’t look like your hardware has an eMMC slot)
Could it be that the installation was successful, but the system still booted off the flash drive when you rebooted?
Yes, I even format the internal hard disk to BeFS. It is booting from the usb, but when it is booted without the usb, it only boots into grub rescue, despite it supposedly being installed on the internal drive.
If you want to use Grub, it is necessary to configure grub to find Haiku partition and boot from it.
If grub is not necessary, and you have no other partitions in the hard disk, start by deleting all partitions and recreating them with DriveSetup.
Maybe you need to tell us more information about the machine. How many hard disks, are you trying to keep other os installations ( Windows, Linux, etc ) ?
If it still is trying to boot grub, maybe you need to clean the bootsector of the drive first. A dd of zeros to the first megabytes of the disk to be sure, or a diskpart clean if you can use a windows 10 boot disk.
You can do all of this from the Haiku installer also, but I am not near a Haiku boot disk now to check the exact name of options. But in short, you need to remove some information about old partitions in that disk. Maybe deleting and recreating the partition table would solve it.
To simplify : boot a linux usb disk, dd zeros to the start of that 320GB disk.
Reboot in the Haiku installation, create partition table, partition, format partition as BeFS, back to installer, install on that partition. But I believe cleaning the disk is the key.
That’a what I did; clearing all previous partitions off of it before installing Haiku. I’ll take another jab at it after I finish eating, and come back with my results
Also you can read this thread - it is a recent one with Grub2 present on the machine and Haiku booted with configuring the chainloader mode.
It needs to be familiar with bootloaders and partition stuffs at least on basic level - it is also good to know that 64 bit Haiku boot needs EFI boot, 32 bit Haiku uses BIOS boot loader basically.
Haiku images have both available in the images, but recommended to use this way to boot successfully.
I had no experiences 32bit uefi Haiku bootloader, and bootloader - in bios compat mode - had not loaded the 64 bit Haiku install for me.
In case grub it loads the Haiku bootloader, so in case
32bit you must chainload config the bios version bootloader
64bit you must chainload config the uefi version 64 bit bootloader
There’s a small ESP (standard FAT) partition in the installer image, you can find the EFI bootloader there, but you can find it in the installed BFS volume, as the mentioned Installer material describes where are resides in the installed Haiku BFS filesystem, or in the installer Haiku instance as well.
I’m booting 64-bit merrily from BIOS. Perhaps more accurate to say that 64-bit can do both.
Also, I solved the “previous bootloader” problem by installing the Haiku Bootmanager with just the one entry and an insignificant 1-second delay. It just flashes onto the screen and continues booting.
I have all icons in gray only - that happens in CSM.
Maybe I should set some bootloader option, but as not needed in EFI, I just use it that to boot - selecting the appropriate boot device.
That means there is some leftover GRUB boot code in the master boot record of the disk.
You can erase that using the writembr command.
The “install boot menu” from Installer would also work, but it seems your disk uses the GPT partitioning scheme. Currently, our boot menu is not compatible with that (installing it would erase the GPT partition table), that explains why you get the “incompatible disk format” error, and this solution can’t be used.
Another option is to recreate the partition table of your disk using the intel partition map. This will also rewrite the bootsector with Haiku compatible MBR code (the same code that’s used by Windows, DOS, … everyone but Linux who puts a special GRUB loader there instead).
To all, I have referenced both this thread (or whatever) and the installation guide and was able to install Haiku successfully! You all have been immensely helpful and I wish the best to you all!
EFI is not equal with Secure Boot only - which was required by Microsoft - but fine hardware tests under - Diagnosis - and many more features in the firmware
which was called once
BIOS
and now EFI or UEFI,
depends on it is before standardize(d) or after that.
For example,
this HW detection feature or diagnosis was an entire partition in Win XP times - cca. 2004 - with bunch of single - Dos/Windows ?? - programs, so if I wanted to use it, then I had to spare that partition.
And why not use it ?
Of course, as it was before - the settings enabled or disabled – letting the consumer to utilize its capacity – depends onmachine manufacturerandUEFI provider.
Fortunately DELL - who’s products I use lately - is generous and let the user set many things in their firmware.
But me now uses mainly portable PCs, not desktop PCs, those may provide more stuff to set(up) in their firmware
However …
simple music playing,
voicing error messages instead of error codes by beeping
or other interesting or strange ideas
– before full booted OS - literally … had gone.
I just installed Haiku on my Lenovo T540p. I formatted the entire drive to BeFS and continued the installation. It did NOT mark the drive as Active and will not boot to it. The only way to boot is with the original USB stick inserted, and it is tending to write new apps to that stick rather than to the internal drive. I have tried using DriveSetup to mark the partition as active, but that option is ghosted whether the drive is mounted our not. And for some reason, the USB stick is no longer usable as an installation medium, so to attempt to reinstall would require burning the stick again.
What am I doing wrong? I note that GPartEd is not available to download, so I would have to do that externally and load it as a distro rather than run it as an app.
This is a symptom of the partition not being recognised, with a wrong type or layout.
I don’t know the details of your laptop but generally with other Thinkpads you need to set mix boot mode Legacy/EFI with legacy first.
Then I would suggest to follow the official guide:
Don’t wipe the disk and format it directly in BFS, you need to create a partition first, as big as the disk if you want, and format it.
If it does not work for some reason, try these instruction to set an EFI partition:
