Problem booting Haiku from USB drives

1

I have a 16 gigabyte USB thumb/flash drive and an 80 gigabyte USB external hard and Haiku will not boot from either of them. I have the option to boot from usb drives enabled in the B. I. O. S… I have to load bootman from the cd and then tell it to boot from the usb drive. I suppose this is a good alternative, but I don’t think this willl do as R1

2

I can boot my PCs from USB, it does work. Can you try to boot off the 16 GB flash drive from some different PCs?

What PC are you trying to boot from?

The symptoms you describe are as if the PC can’t really boot from BIOS. Can you install Linux on the flash drive and try that?

3
  1. Even if USB is enabled in the BIOS, some BIOSes do not start automatically from the USB drive. So, you have to press a key (eg F11). Then a pop-up menu appears and let you choose a boot device.
  2. your partition must be flagged "active" in the partition table.
  3. your USB drive must have a working MBR... You can copy the Haiku's MBR from the anyboot raw image with a command like: 
    dd if=/anyboot.img of=/dev/disk/usb/…/…/raw bs=440 count=1
    NB : adapt the « of » parameter to your USB drive.