I created a partition with GParted and ran the installer. In the initial screen, all the icons at the bottom lit up.
The first time I tried to format the partition, which had been pre-formatted as ext, Haiku gave the error “Drive setup could not be launched.”
I then deleted and recreated the partition, taking care to leave it unformatted, to see if that helped. On that occasion, there was no error message: clicking on the desired partition had no effect.
I was able to get it working by creating a partition with gparted as unformatted then boot into haiku and format it with the haiku partition manager
I was then able to select the haiku partition for installation and don’t forget the button that makes the partition bootable
You have to initialize the partition to BeFS before you can click on and use it. The Alpha1 LiveCD allows this when you boot to the installer. ie: Use Haiku’s disk partitioner from the Installer to do this.
Also, good idea to write boot sector. There is a button in the installer you press to do this.
Re: ‘Write boot sector’ button in installer
The boot sector will be written to the partition automatically as part of the install process. You do NOT have to press that button. At the end of the installation you get an info message in the top right corner of the installer that (among some other things) tells you that the boot sector has been written.
This was also mentioned on the mailing list, you can read here if you don’t subscribe:
The button is in other words redundant if you do a standard install from the CD. If I understand correctly it has the same function as the makebootable command from within Haiku. It should be put away as part of some advanced options in the installer. Or perhaps just as well integrate that functionality into DriveSetup (which is accessible in the installer).
Third time lucky! The partition-formatter has come to life and Haiku is now installed.
The formatter has suddenly worked - third time lucky! / so I now have a Haiku system at last.