things that don't work

By basd on Oct 19, 2010 | In -arghhh!!

Sometimes my best efforts are fail. Sooo ... it was try to install Haiku night.

...

I have a spare old computer. I have a Haiku alpha2 disk. What could go wrong?

Need a partition -- got room on the disk BUT after shrinking my /home partition, I learned that I can only go to 4 partitions. So, I've got windows, linux /root, linux /home and linux /swap. Oops.

I would be ok with removing linux. However, there is a tiny problem. The Haiku installation notes indicate that Haiku will not set up dual boot. Sooo...

It seems I will need Grub. But, if use my linux partitions, I won't have grub anymore.

I would be ok with reinstalling Linux, maybe creating an extended partition so I can have more partitions, or whatever is necessary.

But, I only have a 64 bit copy of the OpSu installer at the moment. This computer won't boot from USB, where I've got another version of OpSu. And, I don't have any blank CDs to download and burn a new CD.

Sheesh. So, I installed Haiku to a USB drive with the hope that I could get it to boot from grub, then added Haiku to grub ... but the computer does not recognize the USB drive at boot. So, that was a Fail, and only later did I realize how much fail was involved.

Because after the first boot ... I had no Grub anymore! Welcome to Windows.

Which was an interesting adventure as well because the WindowsXP on this computer has not been updated for a Very Long Time, which means -- get this for amazement -- it works really well! This is the puzzling thing about old computers -- they don't work very well. Which makes me wonder who they could possibly have convinced anyone to purchase them in the first place?

It's just all those wonderful updates, that's all. Without the Wonderful Updates, the Very Old Computer works just fine.

But anyway, how to get grub working again with limited resources???

After much browsing about, I found Bootpart from Winimage. Hey, cool!

Because, first I found lots of explanations of how to get Linux to boot from the Windows bootloader, yada, yada -- all of which shared the same problem: it was necessary to actually boot into Linux in order to grab the 1st 512 bytes of the boot record. Which, well, I couldn't do because Grub was gone!

Bootpart is a command line utility and it grabs the 512 bytes, creates the necessary boot file and modifies boot.ini.

Unfortunately, I ran it from the desktop, which ended up with the boot file being inaccessible from the Windows bootloader. So, I moved it to c:/, re-edited boot.ini, and then it works. How cool is that!

I also downloaded another program that might have solved the problem, but I was expecting a GUI program. Win32grub.exe or something like that. It mibht have been largely the same as bootpart. Don't know. Because, I clicked on it a couple of times, the DOS window flashed by and nothing happened.

Well, the same nothing happened when I clicked on bootpart.exe, but by then it finally occurred to me that I should be running this thing from a cmd window.

So ... that was a lot of fail, still don't have haiku loaded to an actual computer.

I don't want to wipe out WindowsXP on this computer, because every now and then I need Windows for something. And at the moment, this version seemingly runs pretty well. I guess this project waits for another day, then ...