Just thought I’d share how I solved my problems getting Haiku Alpha 3 to boot. You may find the ultimate solution amusing; hopefully some may find it helpful.
I started off with a CD of Haiku that I had burned, made a partition, then installed it. However, because I had installed Windows first on my boot HDD, my bootloader was Windows Boot Loader, not GRUB, and the Haiku partition did not show up. Further, when I tried to use the CD to start the install I had on the HDD partition, it kept on acting as a Live CD. Problem.
“Fine”, I thought, I’ll go into my Ubuntu partition and make GRUB the bootloader, then edit the scripts per the instructions at Haiku-os.org. “How hard can it be?”, I thought to myself, naively. Well, I found the Ubuntu HUD (Head Up Display) more or less impossible to use, and working out how to launch GRUB was not exactly easy.
I had been thinking about trying out Linux Mint, and it seemed like a good time … so I downloaded the ISO, burned, and installed … and presto, Linux Mint installed GRUB 1.99 for me and helpfully compiled a list of all the OSes I had installed. So: I have a nice list presented to me at boot time, I scroll down to Haiku, select, and boot. Problem solved.
[Did I say that I solved my problem? No, I should give all credit to those user-friendly guys at Mint. Hooray for Mint!]