Usual question: "I've dd'ed the image to somewhere and now it doesn't boot". Usual advice: "You have to make it bootable by using makebootable". Usual reaction: "Ehm, ok how do I do that?". Since this type of question comes up quite frequently, let me try to explain a bit of background on that pseudo-mystical tool "makebootable", how you can get it and how you can manually make a partition bootable without even needing makebootable.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmlr/2009-02-08_makebootable_what_and_why_and_how_do_it_manually/