-I have installed to a 4GB USB drive after booting the live cd and everything went according to the instructions. I am using Alpha3 on an Asus eeePC701SDX.
The problem is that the USB will not ‘cold’ boot by itself. I can boot to the USB drive by withdrawing the live CD during the boot process and Haiku works from the USB pefectly from there.
I expected it to boot from the USB drive without other intervention during the process. The bios boot order is correct but produces this error message: error: unknown filesystem
grub rescue>
Do I have to make a boot point in the partition or setup a boot process??
USB drives are tricky. one can install haiku to the raw drive, or make an intel partition and install to the partition on the usb drive. Whitch is right depends on the bios in the system. I install to the raw device … in my case DriveSetup shows /dev/disk/usb/1/0/raw it could have been /dev/disk/usb/1/0/0 indicating partition 0. Your mileage may vary.
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction because when I reinstalled to the ‘Raw’ disk it booted correctly.
I appreciate your help 
Install bootman to the USB drive. GRUB (which iws what threw the error) can’t read the BFS volume on the drive. Botman won’t have that issue
this “dd” command will copy the boot program located in the MBR from the Haiku live CD to your USB-key (and so you won’t need Bootman).
PS : the boot program will look for an active partition, so, make sure your partition is flagged “ACTIVE” (Drive setup will show you this flag)[/quote]
Ah yes, I see your point and it is a more conventional setup. I will take up your suggestion but I guess it is not essential when using a USB Drive solely for one OS.
Many thanks for your help.
I must admit to being a bit inexperienced in things Haiku and I googled Bootman and it appears to be included in alpha3…I dunno, just sayin?
[quote=plumtreed]Thank you for pointing me in the right direction because when I reinstalled to the ‘Raw’ disk it booted correctly.
I appreciate your help :)[/quote]
your USB key misses a valid MBR. It’s quite difficult to make DriveSetup initialize a valid one.
So, boot from your Haiku-Alpha3 live CD, plug the USB-key you want to boot from, and run the following command :
dd if=/dev/disk/[YourCdDrive]/raw of=/dev/disk/usb/[x]/0/raw bs=440 count=1
just, adapt [YourCdDrive] and [x] to your system…
Thanks Starsseed but just what is this supposed to do?
Bootman is used for dual booting on the same disk drive eg Windows and haiku on different partitions on then same drive. This is not required if you only have haiku installed on the usb drive.
this “dd” command will copy the boot program located in the MBR from the Haiku live CD to your USB-key (and so you won’t need Bootman).
PS : the boot program will look for an active partition, so, make sure your partition is flagged “ACTIVE” (Drive setup will show you this flag)
I have been having the same problem. I have Haiku R1 Alpha 3 installed to a 16gb usb drive. My computer will not boot it but restarts. I have to insert the live CD and boot from it and then insert the usb drive when the bootman is loading. After that it loads from the usb drive just fine.
The Haiku live CD doesn’t boot from Bootman and Bootman can’t swith to an other boot disk.
( #3545 (bootman : implement multi-drive support) – Haiku ). I think you meant haiku_loader…