Instructions on UEFI installation are really unclear, can and should be expanded

Greetings!

I believe that UEFI booting instructions could be improved. I would make a pull request myself, however I don’t believe I have enough knowledge in regards to the matter to make clear recommendations with reasoning. Still, I have following proposals for article expansion:

  1. Partition Layout part (and this article in general) assumes that user installs Haiku on the empty hard drive and that it will be the only Haiku installed and loaded. However, people usually already have a ESP partition installed on their system. I believe that this need to be clarified, as beginners may create additional EFI partition or erase existing ones.

  2. Same problem goes for the EFI bootloader installation guides below. I don’t believe it’s suitable to install Haiku bootloader in the EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi location as it is, if I understand correctly, default location for the UEFI to try and find some application if none are preferred in settings. I believe it would be suitable to recommend creating other directory, for example Haiku. This way, no other system can overwrite this file and there won’t be a confusion in regards to “how do I boot in my other systems”. Of course, there may be a confusion about “how do I boot into Haiku now”, but it is much simpler to clarify, in my opinion.

  3. This is more of a question rather than a idea for article improvement, but I’m curious about how Haiku bootloader will know or can be configured to know about where main system partition is, especially considering that one may install Haiku alongside other systems.

I believe this post will create an interesting discussion and result in improvement in documentation. Thanks in advance for clarifications and explanations and/or other ideas.

3 Likes

The bootloader will look for the gpt partition type guid, and use it to detect an Haiku partition. If it doesn’t find one, it will goto the early boot menu where you can chose a partition manually.

Efi support is incomplete, ultimately this will be integrated in Installer and BootManager to provide a smooth and easy user experience, as it should be.

1 Like

Thanks for the answer.

Regarding installation features - well, personally, I am no enemy to manual bootloader installation, so I believe that, also given the fact that this feature is not ready yet, current situation should be documented properly.

I mean, documentation is never bad, especially on such sensitive (and scary for some) topic, am I wrong?

2 Likes

The original guide was written by @kallisti5. He might want to address these himself; or if not, I guess I could take a look eventually. One question I can answer right now, though:

It just boots off the first bootable Haiku partition on the disk it is installed on. If there are no Haiku partitions on said disk, it will display a menu and ask you to pick one from another disk (or say that it found none, if there aren’t any at all.)

1 Like