[haiku-development] Re: Booting from USB

  • From: pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:32:56 -0700

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 08:16:57PM -0700, Urias McCullough wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 8:07 PM, Pete Goodeve <pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
> > I put r44242 on a stick last week, but this rev no longer boots on
> > my machine (as I also reported last week).  However, as I at least
> > saw the boot icons -- even if they didn't light up -- I took it over to
> > ZaReason to try.  On their machine it wasn't even seen by the BIOS
> > at all!
> 
> Actually, I've had similar problems with ZaReason machines (yes, I
> tested on them a few years back at LinuxWorld/OpenSourceWorld) - and
> you'll likely need to use the anyboot images on a USB stick.
> 
> The Anyboot images have a "fake" partition table/MBR layout which
> fools most BIOS into believing they are a proper setup. They are also
> suitable for burning to a CD and booting as an "ISO" since they
> contain a fake "el torito" boot as well.

Well, I'll be...!  When I *finally* managed to dd the latest AnyBoot
onto a stick, not only did the BIOS boot now recognize it, but it booted
all the way to a working system!  OTOH, trying to use the Haiku bootloader
from the hard drive still only gets to where it did before -- icons that
never light up.

I really don't understand where the different things are happening.
Another difference is that from the BIOS, I get a 'release' boot
screen, complete with Haiku logo, but the HD bootloader just shows
the icons.  Is that screen in the bootloader?  I always thought it
was in the 2nd stage loader.

Getting there was hell, too.  There must be something awry in USB-disk
handling -- either with my machine or Haiku (or maybe the rev I'm using).
Any transfer -- copy, Install, dd, whatever -- just seems to stop completely
for long periods.  Then it will resume for a while, and stall again.

When I tried the first dd this morning, I left it for three hours, and
it hadn't finished!!!  I despairingly did ctrl-C, and found it was about
3/5 the way through.  [Didn't find out about the "kill -USR1" trick
until after I'd done that.  RTFM...] I restarted from just before the
last block transferred, and it finished in maybe 20 minutes!

However.  The new build is still not right, at least when running from
USB.  (I'll set it up on a HD partition sometime but I haven't yet.)
As soon as I try running anything through the audio chain, it freezes
the screen for many, many seconds at a time.  I have the audio mostly
tamed with my custom libraries in r42415, but I tried replacing the
r44242 ones with those, and saw no difference.  I guess it must be
priority inversion again, but I'm not sure where things might have
changed.

Guess I'll have to take the new stick over to ZaReason and see what
happens, but I sort of feel I'm still moving backwards at the moment.

        -- Pete --


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