<p>The Installer is used to copy Haiku onto another volume.<br/>
Upon launch it displays a start window with important information. It's not a mindless EULA you're used to click away in the blink of an eye, it states:</p>
<li><p>This is alpha-quality software. Make backups or suffer the consequences!</p></li>
<li><p>The Installer needs a prepared partition. You may have to use a <ahref="http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php">GParted LiveCD</a> or a similar tool until Haiku's DriveSetup is mature enough to handle this task.</p></li>
<li><p>Haiku can be added manually to the bootmanager <ahref="http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html">GRUB</a>. In short, you have add an entry to <spanclass="path">/boot/grub/menu.lst</span> of your Linux installation, similar to this:</p>
<p>In the first drop-down menu you choose the source for the installation. It can be a currently installed Haiku or can come from an install CD or USB drive, etc.<br/>
The second drop-down menu specifies the target for the installation. This target partition/volume will be completely overwritten and has to be set aside beforehand by a partitioning tool like GParted.</p>
<p>Clicking the little expander widget will <i>Show Optional Packages</i>, if available, that you can choose to install in addition to the basic Haiku.</p>
<p>You should do a last check if you really picked the right target before starting the installation process. Click on <spanclass="button">Setup partitions...</span> to open <ahref="applications/drivesetup.html">DriveSetup</a> and have a look at the naming and layout of the available volumes and partitions.</p>
<p><spanclass="button">Begin</span> starts the installation procedure, which basically copies everything but the <spanclass="path">home/</span> and <spanclass="path">common/</span> folder onto the target volume and makes it bootable.</p>
<p>It can happen that some other operating system or partitioning tool (accidentally) overwrites the boot sector of your Haiku volume. The button <spanclass="button">Write Boot Sector</span> makes it bootable again.</p>