Well I managed to boot without rEFInd. I first installed a windows 10 boot camp (no license needed because I was getting rid of it anyway). Then I booted the Haiku thumb drive. Then I formatted the ntfs boot camp drive, and installed Haiku to it. Then I copied the loose files (Deskbar, haiku_loader.bios_ia32,
kernel_x86_64, runtime_loader, Tracker) from the booted usb drive to the Haiku install drive.I think there was something else I copied from the usb to there Haiku partition, not sure if it was necessary though. (Something in data maybe). Anyone can let me know if they are stumped there. Then I could boot from the regular Mac boot select menu. It’s listed as “Windows”. Idk if it’s OSX doing that or if it’s something else.
EDIT: It was the platform loaders folder, in the data folder. I think I just copied the data folder over.
This is from this topic about installing on a macbook pro.. I forgot about the Windows boot camp part. I don’t know if it is necessary if Haiku is your only system. Definitely needed it I think for dualbooting with OS X. Probably related to the ESP blessing thing that OS X uses.
I forget where /data/platform_loaders is, but whatever files that were in there enabled me to boot without thumb drive. This was repeatable because I had to re-do it.