I have spent the evening attempting to install Haiku from my laptop HD to a usb using the installer program. I have done this many time in the past. I use it as a backup. Today I went to do that after updating my install this evening to the latest nightly. It appears that the installer is not coping all the files. In the system folder all that I have is:
Cache
non-packaged
packages
settings
var
and that is it. I only have these folders. No tracker, or any of the other folders or apps that should be in system. I have tried this on 3 USB drives and it happens the same way each time. All three of these drives have been used in the pass for the exact same thing and was fine.
I watched the installer as it was going and it got to aprox 2/3 of the way through coping files and then just acted like it was done, no errors. But the progress bar and file count clearly did not get any where near the end.
Hi DFergATL!
I can’t reproduce your issue. First off, if you haven’t booted from that USB stick, but just have it mounted in your running Haiku, the number of files/folders in /system is correct. The package management will mount the packagefs on boot, which will then “virtually extract” those packages and you see e.g. Tracker and /system/apps/ in the usual file hierarchy.
Also, remember that USB sticks can have terribly slow write speeds. For me Installer’s progress bar and file count pause for long times when stuff is written, and hurries along while it’s read into the file cache. The bar does reach the end eventually, but it takes another minute for the USB stick’s LED to stop blinking.
Regards,
Humdinger
Welcome to the Haiku shell.
~> sync
Your list of folders looks ok: everything else in “system” is part of the packages, and never actually extracted to disk. The apps and everything will be visible once you boot the USB drive.
what is the “sync” command? Never used it before.
@Pulkomandy
I did the entire process over again. I init the entire USB, format it and then run the install. The install completes. I try to unmount the USB and I can’t. The system is giving me a message that the device is in use and that unmounting may cause data corruption. The problem I have with that is the install completed over 30min ago.
In short to the devs in general. I constantly have problems using USB devices in Haiku, not just this. I have problems of some kind almost every time I connect a USB flash drive to haiku… it’s getting old. The problems are too varied and numerous to go into detail.
P.S. I eventually forced an unmount. I waited almost an hour after the install finished and the system was still telling me I could not safely unmount. After some testing I can tell you that it doesn’t matter if I write one file to a USB or a dozen. I copied a 1meg file to a USB drive and then could not unmount it even after waiting 10min. There is a problem here, at any time I write to a USB, no matter the size of the file or how many, they system never allows for a clean ummount. I have to force an unmount, every time.
I did the entire process over again. I init the entire USB, format it and then run the install. The install completes.
Did you by any chance use Drivesetup to init your stick?
If that’s the case then there you have it, Drivesetup has a bug it doesn’t intit drives correctly, if you look at the size of the partition you created chances are it’s a 1 GB or someth sized one.
Reinit your stick with another tool and then try again,see if it solves your PB.
I finally did get it to work. That did solve my can’t create a bootable usb problem. But I still say there are problems with USB in Haiku in a general way. I can’t copy anything to a USB and then cleanly unmount it.
We can’t do a “general fix” for all your problems with so general reports. We need detailed reports of exactly what you do, what hardware you use (listdev for the USB chipset, and listusb for the USB devices), and what problem(s) you hit. Then one of the developers will be able to replicate the problem and see what can be done to fix it.
I know it's tempting to think "this issue is too obvious, if it isn't fixed yet it means the developers don't care". But this is not true, the issue may be specific to one thing you did, or specific to some hordware you happen to own. Or maybe dozens of users noticed it and not a single one opened a bug report yet. It is important that you take the time and effort to submit bug reports for these problems, which will allow other people to comment there ("I don't have this issue on hardware XXX" or "I had the same problem for years on some machine" or whatever). Then we can collect more data and find the pattern which triggers the problem.