Installing and Dual Booting Haiku and Windows XP

I wanted to dual boot Haiku and XP on my EeePC 1000H, and after a few days of troubleshooting I was able to get it all working. I thought I would post a condensed version of the steps below.

(I recalled these from memory, and tried to double check every step, but let me know if there are any errors.)

  1. Get Haiku installed on a USB stick or SD card, the following article worked like a charm.

http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/how_to_install_haiku_to_usb_flash_drive_from_windows

  1. Make sure you have a free partition on your internal drive, and make sure it has been setup before you start installing Haiku, as the option to create a new partition using DriveSetup isn’t implemented yet. Boot Haiku from the USB Stick, launch DriveSetup and initialize the partition with BFS. Give the new disk a name other then “Haiku” so it won’t conflict with the boot drive, I named mine “Haiku HD”.

  2. Mount the new drive and copy all of the files from the root of the USB stick to the root of the new drive.

  3. Open a terminal window and cd into the /bin directory, run the following command:
    makebootable /Haiku\ HD

after that is done run this command:
dd if=/dev/disk/path/to/haiku/partition of=/Haiku\ HD/home/haiku.img bs=512 count=1

  1. Now copy the haiku.img file to another FAT formatted USB thumb drive, or if you have network access, email it to yourself. Reboot into Windows.

  2. Once back in Windows, Copy the haiku.img file to the root of the c:\ drive. Open the c:\boot.ini file and add the following line to the end of the [operating systems] list:

c:\haiku.img=“Haiku”

(Sometimes, even after you enable “show hidden files” you cannot directly access boot.ini, but you can still edit it by using “Control Panel > System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > System Startup > Edit”)

  1. Reboot, you should now be prompted to select which OS to boot, select Haiku and sit back and enjoy the Haiku goodness.

Thanks for this. Does the trick, and since BootManager’s not ready, this is the ticket.

That’s a lot of extra work. I booted from the sup stick, then ran the installer and BootManager. Yes, BootManager works just fine as long as all the boot partitions atre on the same hard disk.

Yup, it installs okay, and it does as advertised.

Uninstallation, on the other hand, is a different story – at least for me. I couldn’t get it to work and had to resort to fixmbr.

Wait, do you really mean to image the partition as a file inside itself? Because that seems like a particularly bad idea.

Hm, tried this but didn’t work, I got error like “bad superblock”.
I have installed XP on one hdd and Haiku on another, tried to make ntfs partition on Haiku’s hdd and copy haiku.img but i got error for missing some .dll…
Any idea?

both NTFS and BFS volumes must be on the bootable hard drive.