I have a question… very newbie. I am trying Haiku from a USB stick, and although (from what I’ve read here and there) it should be mounting my hard disk (which is Ext3) automatically, or at least show it in the “mount” or “mount all”, Haiku does not show anything.
Any hints on what is happening, or a way to mount them?
Thanks for any hints!
The most likely problem is that your hard drive controller is not supported by Haiku. Please give us more details.
I don’t know the exact details, but the hard disk is a Toshiba (don’t have the model at hand: the computer is an Acer Aspire One model ZG5 (one of the earliest, the hard drive’d version).
I’ve seen some threads somewhere else about using Haiku on it (I even got the wifi running, without any problems), so I thought it was something “easier” than driver problems.
Ruben
I use Haiku on a computer like that. But I have only one partition, formatted for Haiku. Not ext3.
I may be wrong with this, but I think Haiku can only access ext3 formatted disks that were updated from ext2. I think those can fall back to ext2 and Haiku can then use them. I could be wrong though…
At least we have two GSoC projects running to bring us ext3 support (and more). 
Regards,
Humdinger
The 2nd extended filesystem and newer members of its family are backward compatible, new features are indicated using compatibility bitflags flags at the filesystem and inode level. The 3rd extended filesystem can thus be thought of as just being several optional new compatibility bitflags, the most significant is journalling. But as with BFS if the filesystem was unmounted cleanly by the previous OS it is safe to read it without understanding the journal.
So one reason why Haiku might not mount the filesystem would be if it’s dirty and Haiku checks the dirty bit, or if it’s dirty and journalled and Haiku correctly checks the compatibility bits (when I last looked Haiku’s handling of compatibility bits was very poor so this is unlikely)
However a modern Linux distribution enables many non-filesystem features that Haiku does not support. Any of these would prevent Haiku from accessing the ext3 filesystem, and likely even from recognising that it exists. RAID 5, Logical volume management or full disk encryption would be examples. Anybody with a business laptop for example ought to have full disk encryption to avoid problems if it is lost or stolen.
Issue is either:
you should try to see if #1 applies to you. Haiku works with AHCI SATA controller or Legacy ATA mode. Give output for your SATA controller.
Linux: lspci -nn
If not AHCI, then check BIOS for ATA mode and that could work.
Check #1 first and then we can go onto #2.