Hey all!
I ran upon an old 8GB IDE hard drive that I thought was broken (didn’t seem to work when i slipped it into an external HDD enclosure), and lo and behold: an old working version of a BeOS Dan0 install! I was a bit surprised that it fired right up, since it was in a “newer” machine (early P4) than my current (read: ancient PIII-1200) BeOS box that I still have, but rarely fire up anymore.
Anyway, I copied off some old files I needed and installed Haiku onto it to see if it would work, and it worked like a champ! Something is creating a TON of thrashing, and “registrar” is doing something according to ProcessController, but I’m not quite sure what. Gonna give it a spin and see what it can do.
Looking forward to testing Haiku out!
Old or very fast drives can use a lot of power, more than the cheap DC converters that come free with a typical external chassis will supply. I had a relatively modern 160GB disk in a chassis running fine. One day I needed to use an older drive in the same chassis and it wouldn’t spin up properly, just a ticking sound. But on closer inspection the older drive was rated to use almost 20W, with over an amp just on the 12V rail whereas the nice modern one was about 7W - that’s no small difference.
The old drive span up and worked fine once I connected a beefier power supply. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you try this at home - the chassis manufacturer will not have tested this scenario and it could cause a fire. Anyway it will be cheaper in general to just buy a modern disk and get higher capacity and improved performance thrown in.
Going to more modern drive would be better for performance and power usage. 
But I have also run Haiku on 6 & 10 GB drives.
Anyway, I copied off some old files I needed and installed Haiku onto it to see if it would work, and it worked like a champ! Something is creating a TON of thrashing, and “registrar” is doing something according to ProcessController, but I’m not quite sure what. Gonna give it a spin and see what it can do.
You may have drive or data corruption. Best to re-partition and format the drive with Gparted (or other tool). Use Haiku Alpha ISO and installer to initialize to bfs and copy Haiku onto the drive.
You would also want to go to the manufacturer of the drive and get their testing utility to check if drive is good or bad. Could have bad sectors?