Just downloaded VirtualBox. Performed almost exactly the same series of steps (VirtualBox can boot from the ISO so no need to change the extension to HDD and I’m not sure what to pick under the hypervisor settings) and it worked immediately on the first attempt.
Meant to mention, not long after the release of beta2 I was able to get a running Parallels VM with Haiku without any huge struggles. So I think Parallels have changed something.
It looks like parallels may not support legacy bios booting and you need to set up an efi partition which is currently a manual process?
Also, both writembr and makebootable are useless in this process. DriveSetup already does writembr’s jobg and Installer already does makebootable’s job. I don’t know why people insist on randomly running these commands during the install process.
Apparently current Parallels version only boots Haiku using EFI 64bit. Works with the provided disk images, but then it is a pain to install into a larger image because the EFI data is not migrated to the new disk.
For EFI systems you have to follow these instructions: UEFI Booting Haiku | Haiku Project
At some point this will be integrated in the Installer and automated, but for now, these steps are required. But I wouldn’t go as far as calling this “a pain to install”. At least, not more than setting up a BIOS based system properly with a partition table, active partition, and bootsector.
I am not an expert, but have been around BeOS and Haiku for some time now. I still find that these things are not evident to the user, including myself.
I just tried to follow the instructions on UEFI in order to replace the anyboot disk with a larger one in Parallels, and I just can’t make it boot from the new disk when I remove the anyboot disk from the virtual machine configuration. :-/
Sadly, it seems I am not alone.
I ended up returning to VMware Fusion, which works just fine with Haiku. I was having trouble getting a another free license, but finally their website seems to have been corrected.
Regarding Parallels, something somewhere around Haiku beta 3 seems to have been broken. Haiku boots from the tiny disk image provided, but it does not boot from a bigger disk, after installing from the downloaded one. Trying to create the EFI partitions, or MBR seems to be of little help 