Installing a second OS

Off-Topic
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II have been investigating installing a second os along side of HAIKU. HAIKU is the easiest OS ti install, but it has some missing device and filesystem capabilities, one being the ability to read from an external drive that uses an exfat file sysem.

I have initialized my hard disk with an intel partition map and MBR boor menu from Haiku.

I first tried to install PcLinuxOS. The install seemed do go OK, but it wouldn’t boot. I was using Haiku’s BootManager to chain load the / partition. I made several attempts with different partition configuration, installing to a 360GB empty space I had on my hard disk with no luck. Every time I booted to the / partition the system stated “not a bootable partition”

Next I tried freeBSD as I had heard it is a quite capable OS. On the third try it installed, but to my astonishment there was no Desktop/Window manager installed, just the console running full screen. I searched the freeBSD site and forums for a solution to this issue without success.

I decided to try ghostBSD as it has a desktoo environment installed by default. This OS had the same issue as PcLinuxOS, it installed but I could never get it to boot. I got the same “Not a bootable partition” error as with PCLinuxOS.

I decided to try my old favorite OS, Linux Mint. This one installed just like PcLinuxOS, but it booted just fine after the install.

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So the problem is solved, and you don’t have a question, or?

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Not every forum thread has to be a question :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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I use refind to handle dual booting Windows 10 and Haiku. But that’s weird when booting Haiku. When I select Haiku icon, a menu listed, click on the first item, enter the second level menu, there are two Haiku items, click on one, and then enter Haiku booting UI. Every time booting Haiku, I need to do the same selection. Does anyone know why?

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No questions, just providing info.

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I wasn’t complaining. Just checking if I could help with the bootloader.

It sucks a bit that only Mint gets it right. But that’s one more reason for me to recommend Mint if someone asks ‘Which distro’.

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I mean you could make a file to make haiku appear on grub that what I did but this method is a bit glitchy

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On Youtube a plenty FreeBSD installation exists which contain how to setup a a Desktop GUI after terminal reached.. However such installations would be completed in terminal ;-))
when I had watched some of them.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=freebsd+install+desktop+environment

You should select wich Desktop you would use : XFCE, KDE, LXQt, etc

It shows shortly the possibilities – X11 and Wayland ones – from terminal >>>————–> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4PNSeNXEww

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Installed EndeavourOS the other day allongside of Haiku (32bit), installed grub on the root partition for EndeavourOS and Haiku’s bootloader to MBR, with the bootmanager I can now launch both OS’s (well EndeavourOS is borked again after an update there, but that’s another problem. :slight_smile:

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I may go a slightly off-topic here. Since my own system is quite unstable (still), I’ve experienced several times that I needed to reinstall Haiku (including reformatting both EFI and BeFS partitions).

-I wonder, is there a way I can check if the hex-data are valid for the boot-loader recognizing Haiku’s boot partition ?

(Since I moved away from both USB and NVMe SSD, I haven’t seen any serious data-loss problems, but I’m still curious if there’s a good way to check this - I could easily read a block-device’s content from a shell-script).

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Yes, at the first sector (of the whole disk or the partition) there must be the value 0x55 at offset 510 and 0xAA at offset 511.

We are speaking of Legacy BIOS here. On UEFI systems there are no boot sectors.

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I initialized as intel partition map and repartitioned the disk before installing haiku. The Mint installer complained about a remaining eufi boot that might prevent MBR booting. I did the intel partition map and partitioned the disk from the haiku install media. maybe there is a problem with the partition map or partitioning in haiku’s drive setup application that caused all my issues.

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Unfortunately I’m using GPT and UEFI. What I’m fishing for is how the boot-loader is recognizing if the BeFS partition is bootable or not. I’ll probably have to take a snapshot of BOOTX and other files, just to see if they were modified by evil electrons… :wink: