Trying to install haiku on a 08 iMac - stuck on bootloader screen even with failsafe

Help
21

Got some news,

  • Tried a different keyboard, holding ALT right after pressing the power button gives me the mac boot menu. Not directly needed, but this gives me a practical fail safe. Nice.
  • Linux Mint install worked on a bootable USB. So after, debian, Linux mint 22, somehow 23 did work. Why? Might it be because I’ve booted into recovery into EFit into the bootloader?
  • Linux mint installed Grub, which shows two entry for Macos, 32 and 64 bit. Why? Does that mean sometimes it does boot into 32, sometimes 64? And does 32 bit mean nothing can find the bootdisk?

Ps, my autocorrect corrects boot into voor.

22

Perhaps is it a machine that requires an hybrid bootloader? Those machine have a 32 bits EFI software but 64 bits CPU which is a bit confusing.
IIRC currently Haiku 32 bits loader can only boot 32 bits Haiku and Haiku 64 bits bootloader can only boot 64 bits Haiku.There’s work in progress about that and some snapshots of WIP hybrid loaders were available on the forum. Though Haiku bootloader has quite evolved since then and I’m not sure that it would be safe to use them.

23

In the Beta 6 thread i saw some reports of people that have a similar error.

I tried beta5, but on a usb stick. Could it be that the right combo should be dvd beta5? Or were those reported errors unrelated. Je ne sais pas

24

On my 2012 Macbook air I got beta 6 nightly on a usb stick with turning on failsafe and turning off ACPI, now once installed I only had to enable failsafe video. ACPI was fine, I am thinking that ACPI messes with the USB before it completes the boot and it does not find boot partition. Once installed with ACPI off I don’t have any USB working but it finds the SSD and boots fine.

25

Better use an USB stick when you can. The reason is simple : You can update the USB stick before doing an install and you’re not blocked by bugs that have corrected since beta release.

26

Try to boot Beta5 from DVD, from the native Mac boot menu (the one you enter with Alt / Option key)

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27

Yeah so I’ve tried both the DVD and the usb to rule out any USB ports, or the previous mentioned blog, that USB could take hours to boot.

So the long shot indeed seems that Beta6 might do something different than beta5. And I ran into beta5 on USB apple specific shenanigans so truly the dvd.

So, to find another DVD-R in a shop in '26, and I’ll try the long shot.

Ps, I’ve tried fail safe and every option, all video drivers, soundcard. Checking only acpi and fail safe is on the let’s try a thousand different combinations list. Will report back

28

Disabling ACPI gets some machines to boot. But I’ve no idea about this specific mac.

30

If you disable the system hard drive / potentially even disconnect it - does the system boot with the USB Haiku live install media then?