Okay, I just keep meddling with things until something breaks on me. This time, when I boot up, I get my background color, but I don’t get the Deskbar or Tracker running. The mouse is there, and I realized it had booted up when I waited so long that my screensaver started on me, so I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL and the “Restart Deskbar” button was there. I click on it and it starts up, and everything seems to work, except for mounting drives (see below).
So I’m not sure what I did–messed up my boot script?? I ran checkfs and initially it found and cleared up some problems, but upon rebooting, I had the same problem, and further checkfs runs didn’t turn up any recurring problems. So I’m kinda stumped as to what’s happening.
One other noticeable symptom is that my additional drives aren’t mounting on startup, either, and won’t mount manually when I try to mount them, so I’m stuck with just my boot drive. The additional drives are ntfs and fat32 drives, not BFS drives, if that means anything.
Oh, I’m running Alpha 4 (44702), btw.
Meh, now it won’t boot up anymore. As long as it would boot, there was hope that it could be fixed. Time for a reinstall, I guess. At least I haven’t lost anything important. Should I stick to Alpha 4, or should I try the latest nightly image?
Wait 
Did you tried to run a checkfs /boot in a terminal window?
And did you also tried to start Haiku in safe mode? (you can start Haiku in safe mode by pressing the spacebar while Haiku is starting (before to see the Haiku startup logo/icons).
[quote=Giova84]Wait
Did you tried to run a checkfs /boot in a terminal window?
And did you also tried to start Haiku in safe mode? (you can start Haiku in safe mode by pressing the spacebar while Haiku is starting (before to see the Haiku startup logo/icons).[/quote]
Yes, I ran “checkfs /boot” in a terminal when I could still boot it up. But with this last problem, I don’t get the chance to start in safe mode, or at least, it didn’t work. I get a panic message about not being able to mount a boot device. Then it goes into KDL, displays 9 lines, and freezes–I can’t even reboot from KDL, but have to use the pc’s power button to power off and restart the computer.
I’ve either triggered some bug or else I really messed it up somehow.
Okay, so I did manage to try to start Haiku in safe mode, but it didn’t make a difference. It still gave me the panic message. So, I cleared the partition and reinstalled. I decided to try a nightly build instead of reinstalling alpha 4, though. Say hi to Walter, Revision hrev 45686! 
I also left space on the drive so I can install a later version of Haiku, and also a separate partition to save any important info in between installations, or in preparation for the next time I trash the system! Haiku is not only fast to boot up, it’s fast to install, too.