After I downloaded R1/B5 and created my USB boot drive, the system booted flawlessly on two laptops that I have Haiku R1/B4 installed on. I had tried to do the in place upgrade without success so I just re-installed over R1/B4. When the install was done and I tried to boot from the hard disk, I got the splash screen with all the boot icons but, none of them lit up and the system just sat there doing nothing. I thought maybe the old installation was interfering with the new one so I installed again but formatted the haiku partition this time, Same result. Both laptops can boot Windows 10, Ubuntu Linux or Haiku using grub2 (EFI). I think the solution is fairly simple but, can’t figure it out.
I have booted in a live session from my USB and I.m doing this edit using Webpositive while listening to a reggae cover of Billie Eilish’s Ocean Eyes from YouTube using Web.
If I’m reading this right, you had beta4 working, booting through grub2 EFI and beta5 also works if booted from USB.
Just to discard one thing: have you updated the bootloader? I think the change to use zstd compression in packages was made after beta4, so given that the EFI bootloader is not updated automatically, it wouldn’t understand the new packages if you have not updated it yourself. Just in case, though given the setup I guess you already know: copy /system/data/platform_loaders/haiku_loader.efi to wherever you put it last time.
So, I’ve made some progress on one of the laptops. I had not copied the new bootloader to the EFI partition so I copied the one off the EFI partition on the thumb drive. That resulted in a clean boot and I am now composing this reply under Haiku! Sound works, WiFi works and Haiku even attemted to scan for bluetooth devices. So this laptop is fine but, the other one is still just showing the spash screen.
I went into the boot loader menu and under the debug options I chose “Display current boot loader log”. Nothing jumped out at me. Attached are the first and last pages of the log. It’s only like 5 pages so if the rest are needed let me know.
I decided to compare the “current boot loader log” of the laptop that’s not booting beta 5 with the one that does. The first significant difference I noticed was in the fourth line of the attached photo, PackageVolumeInfo::_InitState() : “failed to parse activated-packages: No such file or directory”
So after waiting for the bootloader to be updated a couple of times with the same result (the spash screen is displayed but, none of the icons light up) I decided to try again. One of the things I did was to rename the BFS volume of the laptop by appending (HDD) to the volume name. This allowed me to differentiate between the volume on the thumb drive and the one on the laptop. Before I did that I noticed that even when I used the bootloader on the thumb drive to launch the boot menu it always booted the volume on the thumb drive regardless of which volume I chose and I couldn’t tell which one I was choosing because they both had the same name.
Once that was done i was able to use the bootlader on the thumb drive to boot into the installation on the laptop just fine. Although it did not make any sense to me I decided to try booting without the thumb drive and use safe mode. That worked but, I didn;t have access to networking or sound. I then tried booting with SMP disabled and that worked. So I had networking and sound but, only one provessor. I then tried a normal boot and to my surprise it worked, so now I am able to boot with SMP enabled. I am posting this reply from the laptop (Dell E6430) with all four processor cores working as well as WiFi and sound!
Can any of the developers provide any insights into why it wouldn’t just boot in the first place? What could have happened during the safe mode boot process that would enable normal booting after a successful boot into safe mode?