How to boot with only existing disk?

Hi,

I’m trying to boot from the compiled haiku iso, but unfortunately I do not have spare disk or CD. I have one USB but re-burning the compiled iso to USB each time just takes too much time.

How can I boot with existing disk by adding some menu entry (I guess) ? Should I compile a raw disk image instead of an iso?

Thanks.

depends on what feature are you modifying, for most of them you can just uninstall included package and put your own in non-packaged. If it is a driver it requires blacklisting first. There is software that is auto restarted when closed/crashed like Tracker so you need to tell the monitor (app_roster) to stop watching for it.

Thanks, but actually I do not want to burn it into USB because I might need the USB somewhere else/burn other iso into it. So I think it would be great if there is a way to define something like a "multiboot " in menu entry? I’m not an expert so I guess I’d better ask for help.

if you are going to overwrite MBR with other isos there is not much else you can do, but if not you can partition your drive and install Haiku to it, not just copy/dd into it

I have a second hard drive formatted with a couple of Haiku partitions, and a bootloader to choose which one to boot. One has the latest nightly and source code and is used for compiling. The other partition is a smaller one which is reformatted as an empty disk volume, and I set up the build process to write the compiled Haiku operating system to it.

In more detail, the small partition is formatted with BFS and a volume name of “TestHaiku”, then I set up an environment variable to use it: export HAIKU_INSTALL_DIR=/TestHaiku Then I build with “jam -q -da @install” Then once it’s finished, reboot and select the small partition in the boot menu.

By the way, the second hard drive is used with an MBR partition, so I can boot it (and run the older MBR style bootloader) with a newer UEFI BIOS running in compatibility mode. You may need to figure out UEFI booting if you can’t do that.

If you have a Linux install with a swap partition you can coopt the swap partition by doing swapoff -a , dding an anyboot image to the swap partition and chainloading it from the bootloader similar to how you can chainload windows or Haiku from grub.

then once you are done just mkswap on the swap partition and reboot again to get it back as swap.

As long as your swap partition is larger than the image it should work fine.

Thanks for all your suggestions, but I don’t want to add new partition to the disk yet, there are many data that need backup (just for insurance in case I mess up). I will try that once all data is backed up :slight_smile:

Boot in a VM (virtualbox or vmware would work), install to the USB drive from there… then you have a real install on your USB drive instead of just the CD image without any available space, also without trashing your HDD.

Thanks, I finally decide to use my USB instead of doing risky things to my disk.

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