Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Haiku developments: makebootable & boot options

Just a few weeks ago I knew nothing about Haiku's makebootable command but now I know a lot more. Just today I made a new Haike image bootable in two ways:

1. using the command from Senryu to make a Haiku image on another partition bootable.
This really is simplicity itself. The steps are:
i) Mount the new partition (if it's not already mounted)
ii) Click on the icon to find the path to the image. Don't expect to find the word haiku here. In my case the image path was

/dev/disk/ata/1/slave/3_2

where 3-2 was the image.
Now in a terminal run
makebootable "/dev/disk/ata/1/slave/3_2"
and that's it.

2. Then from a reply to a thread I started I found out about an enormously more convenient way of running makebootable from Linux.

The steps are:
i) Download makebootabletiny.c from here
ii) In the directory to which you downloaded it, compile it with
gcc makebootabletiny.c -o makebootabletiny

iii) Now from the same directory, run it with
sudo ./makebootabletiny /dev/sdXY


All of the steps run in much less than 1 second each, so this is a huge improvement.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was unable to boot Haiku from either the Dell 4550 or from my MacBook. Indeed, on the Dell, no Haiku bootsplash at all showed up and it eventually went to a blue screen which was frozen.
Well, I found today that if, during the boot, the space bar is tapped repeatedly, you're brought to an option menu. Choosing a different video mode (e.g. 1024x768/16 bit) actually brought up the bootsplash but it still ended up on the frozen blue screen so there's no real benefit. I tried playing around with several other safe mode options but all gave the blue screen.
Safe mode did, however, bring up a usable shell but that's about it.
On the other hand, on the Mac, I couldn't even get the options menu as tapping the space bar made no difference.

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