I’ve been using HAIKU for a few months, used it to author a website for our band and then mix an album with Audacity. I booted it up yesterday to back up the album files, then let it go to sleep. Today, I woke it up and almost immediately it locked up hard. First Falkon became unresponsive. I tried to reboot the system, but it got stuck at “tidying things up a bit” and then the main menu became unresponsive as well. After half an hour, I hit the reset button on the machine. Since then, HAIKU has failed to boot. I had a look online for solutions, but all the ones I found were for a black screen AFTER the loading screen. I don’t get a loading screen at all. I briefly get a flashing cursor in the upper left, which then moves down one line, and then disappears. I’ve left it for half an hour and no boot yet. I’ve tried holding down shift and also tried holding down spacebar while booting, but still nothing but a blank screen. I think I got all my files backed up in time, but I’m not 100% sure. I’d like to look at them so I CAN be sure. What would my best next step be? If I boot from installation media, will I be able to view the files on my drive, or will it only allow me to re-install? Should I use the same version I installed, or download the latest one? Or should I install to a new drive, then hook the old one up as well and see if it can be viewed? If it can’t, are there any utilities that could diagnose or recover it? This seems to be a reasonable thing for an O/S designed to run well on old hardware to have, no?
I’d say, download the latest release (Beta5) and put it on a USBstick or burn it to a DVD.
If it’s not a hardware failure, you can boot that and instead of choosing to install, use it as live medium - “Try Haiku” I think the button is called.
Then you can mount your old installation and back up your files.
Sounds good, I’ll give it a try! The BIOS does not report a disk failure. I think most likely some bad data got written to the disk when HAIKU crashed that messed up some file, directory, or other data needed for the boot process, but for all I know it is a graphics problem and HAIKU is still booting I just can’t see it.
Okay, I have booted HAIKU from the beta 5 installation DVD. When I go to “mount” on the feather menu I see 3 things listed. One is called “Haiku installer” the other two are both called “Haiku” One has a DVD icon, the other has a Hard drive icon. Assuming the one with the hard drive icon is my install, I tried mounting it. There is now a checkmark next to it, but no new icon is displayed on my desktop. Is this because no partition was found, or because there is already something on the desktop named “Haiku” and that is confusing things? Or something else?
It shouldn’t matter if there are two “Haiku” named partitions. Maybe the icon is hiding… 
Have you tried right-clicking the Desktop? In the context menu, there should be all mounted partitions in the “Desktop” sub-menu.
Yes, the icon was hiding. Right beneath the other icon labeled “Haiku” The name may not matter, but apparently it remembered where the icon formerly was and as I had never moved it, it was still in the default spot, right where the “Try Haiku” puts the icon for your virtual main drive. 
I seem to be able to read the drive no problem. I don’t suppose there are any utilities that could render the install bootable again? Or a way to re-install over the old installation that keeps all my files and settings?
The /system/var/log/syslog on the old partition may have a clue what went wrong the last time you tried to boot it.
If all else fails, you can use Installer from the boot medium and install over the old installation. Your home folder will be spared, but the system folder and all installed applications in /system/packages will be overwritten.
Well, some configuration files for the base system may be overwritten, but any ones for third-party software should be left alone, yes.
I don’t have a lot of experience reading system logs, but it doesn’t appear that it gets far enough to start logging things anymore. I’m seeing things in the most recent log referring to the last time HAIKU was working, when I was backing up album files to a USB stick, including USB related messages mentioning the name of that stick. After that there are a bunch of memory-related messages, perhaps from it going to sleep and waking back up? and then some DHCP messages, possibly related to Falkon before it crashed? And that’s the end of the log. So no real clue as far as I can tell what happened or is happening when I try to boot.
Trying to back-up files off the old drive, I find some of the directories are broken. Trying to ls or explore them in a window hangs. I’m still able to use cp to copy some files over from them but eventually it locks up as well. Once I’ve copied what I can, the file system is gonna need to be fixed or remade. I’d expect the installer will check/fix it before installing, correct?
Try using checkfs in Terminal.
Oh weird. Although I still can’t bring up some directories in a window, cp -r seems to not actually hang. It’s just in some directories it is going agonizingly slowly. One .iso I had downloaded that was admittedly several gigs big took several hours to copy. At this rate it may be a while before I’ve gotten everything off. Then I’ll try checkfs. I’ve used a variety of Unixes in the past, but other than watching a friend try out a BeBox he bought back in 1997, I don’t have a lot of technical hands-on experience with BeOs/HAIKU so I never know what’s gonna be the same/different from say Ubuntu. I didn’t even know it was kinda Posix compliant at the time. I mainly remember him showing me how you could turn off the processors one at a time until the machine stopped.
Personally, I wouldn’t bother with checkfs etc. After everything possible is backed up, I’d rather format the partition and start afresh. And hope it’s not some hardware issue that borked things before…
Would be kind of curious if the culprit becomes known. Hardware … software … sleep during heavy filesystem activity …? I don’t remember ever having a single BFS problem in all the years I’ve been using it, but there are lot of things I don’t do. I assume “backups” were done by simply copying via the standard user interface. I must say I thought the mention of Falkon was a little ominous, as I’ve seen it crash the OS, but that’s presumably irrelevant if it wasn’t running when the problem occurred.
I have found Falkon crashy, but usually it only crashed itself. I was mainly using it to access youtube and slack (had to make it pretend to be a different browser for slack, but it seemed to work fine) But if there’s a better way to do those things in HAIKU, I’m all ears. I was using beta 4, and I’m not up on what’s new in beta 5 yet. I did run checkfs. Similar to cp -r, it took a very long time (4-5 hours) but in the end didn’t report any errors.
I have now tried re-installing HAIKU on the same partition, and it behaved similarly to cp -r. It took MUCH longer to install than it did the first time, and ran much slower as well. I have now reformatted the partition and am doing a clean install which is going normal speed. Whatever was wrong with the partition, checkfs didn’t return any errors. But it sure slowed HAIKU down. Anything that required disk access took at least 10 times as long as it did before. So far, the new install is working fine.
Well, not anymore. After initially working well, the install has gotten slower and slower. I even tried re-installing Beta 4 in case it was a Beta 5 thing, but nope. It appears the drive is failing, but in a very weird way where instead of giving me errors, it just starts to take longer and longer to read/write data. That’s a new one on me.
Confirmed by trying to access the drive with another OS. Windows can’t even format it. Seems it’s a miracle HAIKU could even use it at all.
My condolences, I’m sure it was a fine drive… 