My experience with Haiku not doing extra is great on my boxes, works as expected and Haiku is excellent neighbour. Linux (Ubuntu/Mint) on the other hand try to do more by installing grub and messing up the boot sequence, corrupting working systems, leaving a bad impression on them.
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Did you prepare your USB key from DriveSetup as āUse whole deviceā or by creating a partition scheme and then by creating 1 partition for whole volume? I believe the later approach gives you more chances to boot from it.
So in DriveSetup:
- Choose āCreate new Intel partition tableā - this will create MBR partition scheme.
- Choose āCreate Haiku partitionā - this will create one large partition of type Haiku.
- Mark given partition as active.
- Select the partition (not the whole disk) and choose āFormat partitionā - this will format partition with BFS filesystem.
After that exit DriveSetup and choose this partition as installation target.
I find that surprising. The code in the MBR set up by DriveSetup does nothing very fancy. The main difference is it parses the partition table by itself, where BootMan just stores hardcoded offsets to the partitions when it is installed. The other is that the MBR is very compact, fitting in the first sector of the disk (and sharing that with the partition table), to the point that there is no space even for good error messages, so it has things like āNo SYS Loader!ā because there is no space for more than that.
In this case here the message was:
So it means the MBR did find the stage1 loader in the partition. But then the stage1 loader did not find the OS. This would be a problem if makebootable has not set up the stage1 loader with the correct partition offset, for example.
well, it was more complicated than I expected, but Iām happy I found a solution. To make it work better in my case, maybe the installer could propose to install the boot manager at the end? (saying something that it could help to boot if the installation was targetting an usb key)
I never got this kind of problem on Linux Mintā¦
Iām pretty sure Iāve tried almost all the possibilities, including your last proposal.
I got this error when Iāve configured DriveSetup to have haiku on the whole disk, if I remember well. Later, Iāve created regular Be partitions.
There os 2 distinct group of users: one group installs Haiku like next-next-finish and it works.
The other group experiences every possible esoteric bug when they trying to start the installed system.
This group asks for help here all the time, and the standards answers are:
- Use makebootable!
- Compile makebootable for linux and use that!
- No, dont do that, use writembr!
- Nah, bootman is the sacred way!
- No, just initialize it, that should be enough.
- Maybe you want efi, follow this hocuspocus
Now lets imagine if you gets bombarded with completely unrelated hints, what should a beginner think? We dont even know how to boot Haiku?
This is really bad, but the hardcore users using the same install sice ages, updating it regularily so they dont facing with this problems frequently.
No idea how to fix it for once and for all.
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This problems are mostly related to installing to USB disk. USB boot was not supported by IBM PC/360 and different vendors implemented USB boot in various ways. In some cases HDD partition layout do not work for USB. To solve this problem Installer or DriveSetup should be able to produce anyboot disk layout for USB disks. This problem is probably not present in EFI boot.
Does it work properly when installed to USB disk (install, not liveUSB)? Does it work when connected to another PC?
To be honest, Iāve also installed haiku on a laptop, and the installation worked perfectly!
I suppose Haiku is able to detect when youāre trying to install on an usb key (it shows a proper usb key icon when mounting it), so maybe the solution would be to propose boot manager in this case.
Iāve never installed Linux on an usb disk, so I canāt tell. I generally use iso + persistence in this case. I like the fact you can transfer the current live system onto another drive with Haiku!
In fact, there are things experienced users will do without even thinking so itās rarely in docs.
For example, before using a device for another purpose or after a failed install, an experimented user will instinctively put back the device in a clean state before trying another install. This is never in docs first because of this and second because it means that you could fail.
Good day,
I have Linux installed on several USB sticks, actually Fedora Silverblue, running without issues, from USB 3.0. Certain tasks are a bit slower than from hard drive.
Also, I have several Haiku USB 3.0 sticks booting Haiku in UEFI mode, also without any issue. The only issue I have is when I put the Haiku stick with another in the USB switch, so they both share the same USB port. Then copying from one to another is damn slow.
Other than that it works quite fine, and still feels snappy.
Just need to be aware of selecting the USB stick as the install destination, and if you want to boot in UEFI mode, create the EFI partition and copy the EFI boot folder from the installer into that. And, remember to tell the BIOS to boot from USB stick first.
Having Haiku on an USB stick allows you to carry it along to different devices. Also, if you do that, be aware that you may need to change the blacklisted drivers, depending on the hardware conditions.
That allows me, having several USB sticks with Haiku, not to touch the Haiku hard drive, so I can mess around with the stick, and not mess with my clean shiny install 
Regards,
RR
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Welp today is the 30th from where Iām at anyway x3
On my System 76 Gazelle laptop I found the Beta image only starts/installs from USB when I use the USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, the other two ports give me problems if I try to boot from them.
Whenās the beta2 launch 
happening? 
Things got delayed (as usual.) I just pushed the final set of base install packages (including the just-released HaikuWebKit 1.7.0), and fixed the HaikuDepot blocker issue. The only remaining item now is a font-fallback regression.
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No, this is unrelated.