Hi everyone, first time posting here so hopefully I’m doing this right. I’m having trouble installing Haiku on a 4 gigabyte USB stick and getting it to boot - initializing and formatting the drive works, and so does installing it, but it does not boot. This happens on R1 beta 5 and on the latest nightly release as of this post (hrev59820). The boot manager utility also doesn’t work.
This is being done using the default installer. Is there something I might be doing wrong?
You need to give more information…
What do you mean by it doesn’t boot? is that just a black screen? does it get part way into booting?
What type of computer is this? If it’s an AMD Ryzen processor then you’ll need to set up EFI booting.
Apologies for not providing specs, I appear to have resolved the issue partly after you sent that message. Specifications are:
HP Elitedesk 800 G1 SFF, i5-4590 @ 3.29 GHz, 16gb RAM
This was a refurb with a 256gb SSD and a 1tb HDD. It came with Windows 10 but doesn’t boot off the SSD since attempting to install Fedora in a dualboot config. The Haiku stick boots only if the SSD is disabled in the BIOS boot order menu, both under UEFI and legacy boot sections. The question arises, then, that the computer still tried to boot off the SSD despite “USB hard drive” being listed above it in both sections…
ETA: The USB also failed to format even after rebooting with it plugged in. The only way I’ve gotten it to properly format is by flashing ReactOS’s live CD to it beforehand.
Ahoy @System_7 ,
I understand you want to install Haiku onto a 4.0 GB USB drive. It would be very short if you want to do more than just pleased by the installed system. It may not USB 3.0 capable, but in your machine have 2 x USB 3.0 port besides the 2 x USB 2.0 ports.
This is interesting only in case legacy boot.
Your machine similar as my laptop, but you have a small factor form desktop PC, but what is on the motherboard is equal my Dell workstation laptop in main parts, not the all devices, but the important ones.
You wrote that you tried to boot UEFI and and legacy as well, and
One thing to mention - if you want to boot from a legacy way from a legacy USB drive, then maybe you have to set the BIOS boot mode exactly to Legacy mode in the BIOS, it might not work by generating boot list to boot from. I faced to recently in my case some days ago.This is one thing, that can cause the the machine tries to boot from SSD anyway, as in UEFI boot order there is an NVRAM entry that points to the UEFI partition of the SSD.
Another case – your UEFI BIOS is in Legacy mode, but then simple thing blocks you to boot from USB drive. You have 2 USB drives plugged in and
both cannot be bootable - any reason
the target usb disk is that the bios tries to boot, but not bootable - several reasons. One reason you named
I do not know which USB drive, I just assume it is the target drive. To create a bootable Haiku partition and filesystem, you have to set the partition type also, not just any kind of partition, and that is most simple to do it with Drivesetup in Haiku. The formatting to BFS filesystem just another requirement to install Haiku. If the partition type does not match to BFS - that can block booting Haiku. It happens mostly if you use Linux and select type random, not BeFS as it is registered in Linux environment, because there there was a filesystem which was already called for BFS.
This any case above the boot order fails in case legacy mode boot order to boot from USB drive - as no bootable USB drive – and skip to next one in the order - that is somewhere the SSD.
You had not confirmed which version you wanted to install :
x86 – 32 bit or x86_64 – 64 bit
It is important, because in case 64bit Haiku the default boot is UEFI boot.
You must install the Haiku bootmanager bootman onto the target USB thumbdrive, and that will help to boot the device just in case of legacy boot.
If you want to boot in UEFI mode, your BIOS settings can remain in legacy mode, but then you have to prepare a small Haiku ESP partition on your target USB device. At every boot you have to generate a boot list, and select the UEFI from the target USB device.
The official Haiku images, so the well written installation media always contain a small ‘haiku esp’ partition, that contains the whole UEFI stuff you need to boot from.
Do you want to use the Windows installation on the SSD ? if no then I suggest to use that SSD to install Haiku there. Or if you want to install Linux there, then I understand that as well if you keep that intact.
Also an interesting question :
How to created the Haiku installation media.
I found 2 reliable method, with dd command and Balena Etcher (I cannot use it for any bootable when I tried it on Windows 7, but recently I found it on Linux Mint, where it worked well, for 2 x Haiku 32 bit installer sticks (Beta5 + Nightly). I hope your installation media is reliable.
I recommend the SSD once more, as it has bigger capacity, especially as you can create even 3-4 partitions in MS-DOS mode, and more in case GPT formatted.
Of couse if you have a bigger and more reliable USB 3.0 drive than a noname one, which may have a good USB 2.0 compatibility, then you can install Haiku onto USB thumbdrive with a calm heart.
as it described here – Making Haiku USB stick
If you’re using USB3, you should be aware that some USB3-sticks get very hot and then thermal-throttle (shutting off until it’s cooled down).
I ran into that problem several times when trying to install (especially) ubuntu on my machine (but also Debian and Haiku).
My solution is to … If possible, use a USB2 stick in a USB2 port.
If you don’t have a USB2.0 stick, then try inserting the USB3 stick into a USB2 port, forcing it to transfer data at a slower rate.
No free USB2 port ? -Try using a USB2 extension cable; it converts a USB3 port to a USB2 port.
-Maybe you don’t have this problem at all, but if you do, you’d need to write the image to the USB-stick from scratch (as it might be garbled already if written when using the USB3 port).
-Once you’ve got the image ready, you could still run into boot problems; if so, keep hitting space during boot, that will bring up the Haiku boot menu, where you can set up safe boot (it was enough for me to change the display settings).
Note: I also attempted to install ReactOS, but never got that working - Haiku was a lot easier to get working for me.