Hello, I’m a new comer here.
I want to try Haiku and how it does things, but I’m afraid of installing it on a new partition with the dd tool. Two months ago, I lost my 50gb partition playing with a faulty partitioning tool(and my own mistake) on winxp, so I really don’t have the courage now… And I find virtual machines too slow. so I’m trying to boot the disk image as a disk drive with various tools without succeeding until now, and I thought knowing the heads and sectors per track of the raw image would be a good thing.
May someone give me this information please?
Haiku is very usable in Virtualbox and Vmware, but if you still want to use hardware, you could ask in the haiku mailing list for the dev Sikosis to help, thats if another doesn’t help you here first.
Modern disk controllers, operating systems and bootloaders use Logical Block Addressing, LBA which is a simple linear addressing scheme. The Cylinders/Heads/Sectors addressing scheme has been obsolete for more than a decade. Thus a raw disk image makes no assumptions about the numbers of heads or sectors which might arbitrarily be reported by your hardware via compatibility interfaces.
Most likely if you think you need CHS values you are doing something completely wrong.
You will probably get better help if you follow one of the existing guides to installing Haiku e.g. to a USB stick and report whatever problems you encounter.
I did some more search…
Initially I was trying to boot the raw image using grub4dos(this seemed the best for my situation), a grub derivative, but it seems that it will not boot from an image file unless the OS is a real mode one, like MSDOS.
I can get the haiku booting screen by chainloading it, but that’s all, then I get an error message saying there’re no bootable partitions. So I don’t think it will be possible.
Thanks for your help, Nyhus & NHFM.
hello Erstnzi
the raw image does not take care about heads sectors ands tracks but,that said, for r28654 raw image the total size is 471040 sectors
the correct disk geometry for this image should be 16 heads, 31 sectors per track and 950 cylindres and then a total size of 471200 sectors
if you want to see the geometry for an other disk image, you cant can try my little disk converter http://starsseed.free.fr if you try to convert a raw image to a virtual pc image it reports the geometry for the target disk.
however, the raw image is not actually a disk image, it's more like a partition image, so if you want to install haiku in a partition you can create this partition with your every-day-OS with a size at least as big as the source image and then copy the image onto the new partition using dd
NB : you may need to prepare the image with haiku's makebootable to tell the bootloader what is the haiku's partition
The raw images are basically disk images with no partition table, where the partition starts at the beginning of the disk.
You can dd one of these images to a whole disk in order to allow them to work without using makebootable (that way the partition offset is at 0)
This will likely destroy any contents on the disk, however, which is why most people recommend dd’ing it over a USB stick.
If you must resort to downloading the sources and building/running makebootable, you might as well just use that same setup to build Haiku to a partition directly at that point which gives you many more options and generally yields a better end-solution.
If you aren’t planning to destroy a machine or two and learn something in the process, I suspect Haiku (and OS testing in generally) is not yet for you.
[quote=umccullough]The raw images are basically disk images with no partition table, where the partition starts at the beginning of the disk.
You can dd one of these images to a whole disk in order to allow them to work without using makebootable (that way the partition offset is at 0)
This will likely destroy any contents on the disk, however, which is why most people recommend dd’ing it over a USB stick.
[/quote]
because the raw images are basically disk images with no partition table, its containt is the same than a partition. That’s why you can dd the image onto a partition ( for example /dev/hda2 ) rather than the whole boot disk (/dev/hda)
If you don’t want to take any risks, you can install haiku onto a second hard drive(a small old one is enough), and choose the boot disk in the BIOS options.