I thought I should put this in here since I’m not having a problem per se, rather that I’m trying to confirm if what I’m asking is possible. What I need to know:
Is it possible to install Haiku onto a USB flash drive? If so, how?
If installing Haiku on a USB flash drive is possible, can it be installed with persistence, or not? If so, how?
Is it possible to install Haiku using a distro of Linux? I ask because I plan to partition my flash drive using Linux and have both partitions bootable, one using a mini-linux distro and one using Haiku.
If installing Haiku to a second partition is possible, will the BIOS recognize both it and the first partition as separate and bootable?
This is about as clear as I can make my questions, so hopefully it will suffice. Thanks in advance for all the help.
Oh, something else I should mention. I plan on using Haiku mostly as a backup OS. If I use it from my flash drive, will I be able to access any hard drives on my PC while connected? If so, how?
Also, how much space should I leave for Haiku’s install + applications if I can manage to get the partition thing to work?
You can install haiku together with another OS, but you have to write the image on a seperate usb stick first because if you write the image on the stick (with dd, or the windows tool) the hole stick will be erased. So write the image on a spare USB stick, 1GB schould be enough to use it as a installation medium and then boot this stick and install it on a nother USB drive or your HDD.
I would install haiku first and then the Linux Distro of your choice, with a little luck the linux installer will find your haiku partition and add it to the grub/grub2/lilo menu. If not you can add it manually.
If you just write the image on and usb stick or install it from another, haiku will save all changes on your stick.
I hope this makes all sense to you, my english is not that good :-).
You can install haiku together with another OS, but you have to write the image on a seperate usb stick first because if you write the image on the stick (with dd, or the windows tool) the hole stick will be erased. So write the image on a spare USB stick, 1GB schould be enough to use it as a installation medium and then boot this stick and install it on a nother USB drive or your HDD.
I would install haiku first and then the Linux Distro of your choice, with a little luck the linux installer will find your haiku partition and add it to the grub/grub2/lilo menu. If not you can add it manually.
If you just write the image on and usb stick or install it from another, haiku will save all changes on your stick.
I hope this makes all sense to you, my english is not that good :-).
kind regards[/quote]
I have to install my mini-Linux first, because I’m using unetbootin to create my mini-Linux distro and make the persistence exist for that. Since unetbootin only runs on windows/mac/Linux, I’ll have to create the Linux distro first, then partition the drive, and then install Haiku from Linux onto the new partition because windows won’t recognize the second partition. So if you could help walk me through how to install Haiku using Linux, that would be fantastic. I looked at the “Making a Haiku USB Stick” guide, and I wasn’t positive on how the commands should be written, especially when working with a partition instead of a fresh drive.
I’m still not positive about questions #2 (it sounded like you hinted that haiku has built-in persistence but I’m not sure) and #4, and again, I’d like some info in layman’s terms about exactly how to install Haiku using Linux. Thanks!
Some of your questions have already been answered, but I have a few questions for you.
If you install Haiku as a second OS on a flash drive, it’s unlikely that the BIOS will recognize it–this would be no different from having multiple operating systems on a hard drive, and you would need a decent boot manager to find it and boot it.
But why two OS’s on one flash drive? They’re cheap enough to give each OS its own drive.
And once you’re running Haiku, then you can mount any partitions on the hard drives that Haiku recognizes. Just right-click on the desktop, go to “mount”, and select from the available drives/partitions.
I’m not sure what you mean by “installed with persistence”. Can you explain a little more?
Those are exactly the steps I had to take to install Haiku on a 16 GB drive. I had originally used Image Writer for Windows to burn the anyboot image to a 4GB drive. This worked, I could boot up on it, but it only creates a partition the same size as the image. I then tried running the installer from the 4 gig drive onto the 16 gig usb drive, but while the installation seemed to go okay, I could never get the computer to boot from the 16 gig drive.
So in desperation I booted the Haiku cd I had created and ran installer from that to install to the 16 gig drive. Only then did it work, leaving me plenty of space for installing more programs onto the drive.
To make long story short, from Linux’ and Haiku’s point of view there is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE between hard disk and flash stick. You can partition your flash stick as you wish, you can install as many instances of Linux and/or Haiku to any partition, you can install whatever bootloader on it etc. It always worked for me. Just be carefull to install all these actually to flash drive, not to hard disk. Otherwise, all your data will be erased.