Boot Loader
Haiku's Boot Loader can help when you experience hardware related problems or want to choose which Haiku installation to start, if you have more than one (maybe on an installation CD or USB stick).
It's also handy after you installed a software component that acts up and prevents you from booting the system to remove it again. The Disable user add-ons option that's mentioned below, will start Haiku without loading user installed components, e.g. a driver.
To enter the Boot Loader options, you have to press and keep holding the SHIFT key before the beginning of Haiku's boot process. If there's a boot manager installed, you can start holding SHIFT before invoking the boot entry for Haiku. If Haiku is the only operating system on the machine, you can begin holding the key while still seeing boot messages from the BIOS.
Boot Loader Options
Once it's there, you're offered four menus:
Select boot volume | Choose which Haiku installation to start. | |
Select safe mode options | There are several options to try in case of hardware related trouble or if the system becomes unstable or unbootable because of a misbehaving add-on. When moving the selection bar to an option, a short explanation appears at the bottom of the screen. | |
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Select debug options | Here you'll find several options that help with debugging or getting details for a bug report. Again, a short explanation for each option is displayed at the bottom. | |
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If "Enable debug syslog" is activated, a warm reboot after a crash shows these additional options: | ||
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Select fail safe video mode | If you had to activate the option Use fail-safe video mode, you can set resolution and color depth. |
Troubleshooting
If Haiku refuses to boot on your hardware from the get-go, try out setting different options under bug report in any case.
. Consider filing aOn the other hand, if Haiku only suddenly acts up after you have installed some software, especially hardware drivers, you have several options to get Haiku bootable again to make things right by uninstalling the offending package again:
Activating
will prevent most servers, daemons and the UserBootScript from being started.Activating
will prevent using any add-ons (drivers, translators, etc.) you have installed in the user hierarchy under your Home folder.If the offending driver, add-on etc. is installed in the system hierarchy, things get a bit more complicated, because that area is read-only. Here, the SPACE or RETURN key. ESC returns you up one level to the parent directory.
comes into play. With it, you can navigate through the whole system hierarchy and disable the component that's messing things up for you by checking an entry with theOnline, there's the article How to Permanently Blacklist a Package File showing how to make that setting stick.
Rozruch Haiku
After activating one or more options, you return to the main menu and continue booting, which presents you with this boot screen:
If everything works OK, one symbol after another quickly lights up.
The different symbols roughly correspond to these boot stages:
Atom | Initializing modules. | |
Dysk + lupa | Creating rootfs (/) and mounting devfs (/dev). | |
Karta rozszerzeń | Initializing device manager. | |
Dysk rozruchowy | Mounting boot disk. | |
Mikroprocesor | Loading CPU specific modules. | |
Katalog | Final initialization of subsystems. | |
Rakieta | Boot script starting the system. |