Author Topic: Triple OS setup?  (Read 5469 times)

jhong

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Triple OS setup?
« on: October 21, 2018, 05:05:19 am »
Hey there,

Just wondering if anyone has tried the following triple boot setup; ArcaOS, Linux, and Haiku OS?

Any tips or things to watch out for?

Dave Yeo

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2018, 05:54:22 am »
Should work. Make sure you do all partitioning with OS/2 tools and use Airboot to boot.
Linux grub needs to be installed in /boot or / rather then the MBR. No experience with Haiku but I believe it was designed to co-exist with other OSes. Once again best not to let it touch the MBR if possible.
The important things are cylinder alignment that OS/2 is picky about and not losing the LVM info that OS/2 writes in MBR and its partitions.

edit: Let us know how it goes and ask if having problems or need more info.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2018, 05:58:19 am by Dave Yeo »

Ben Hjelt

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #2 on: September 02, 2020, 08:15:57 pm »
Not planning to triple boot or anything so this is just my observation  ;)
Successfully installed Haiku beta2 on empty primary partition (as it ran perfectly from a USB stick) but was unable to boot it directly with AiR-BOOT 1.1.4:
bios_ia32 stage1: Failed to load OS. Press any key to reboot
I believe the same error popped up when I tried AiR-BOOT on a non-OS/2 machine as well, then I just booted via GRUB. HAIKU also has its own simple bootmanager.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2020, 08:27:54 pm by Ben Hjelt »

Mathias

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2020, 03:11:26 pm »
Not sure if Haiku OS will work in a triple setup, but I did a setup with ArcaOS, Linux Mint and Windows 8.1 a while ago.

Using the ArcaOS utilities to partition the hard drive went well for ArcaOS and Windows, but the Linux Mint installer (installed last) didn't want to let me use the previously made partition for Linux because "it is not properly aligned to HDD boundaries".
So I let it re-create the partition, installed Linux Mint, and then went back to ArcaOS maintenance mode and "corrected" the partition errors.
Everything works, everything boots.

And yes.. if your Linux distribution lets you install no boot manager at all, it would be for the best.
This is because installing grub onto the linux partition, you will see two boot managers at start:
1) start the machine
2) first AirBoot wants to know what to boot
3) if you select "Linux Mint", AirBoot boots directly into GRUB, where you can choose again. (makes little to less sense)

So.. would be best if Air Boot boots Linux directly without using GRUB at all.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #4 on: September 03, 2020, 04:28:18 pm »
Hi Mathias, you pretty well need Grub, Grub2 or even LILO to load the Linux kernel into memory. It also gives you the choice of using an older kernel in case an update breaks things, which has happened to me and also the choice of starting in save-mode as well as making it easy to add a kernel parameter, needed on my T42, which needs forcepae or such as the CPU supports PAE but doesn't announce it.
You can set it to have a really short time out or even no timeout which would look like there is no Grub, but Grub would still be there to load the kernel.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #5 on: September 03, 2020, 04:36:23 pm »
So I thought I try Haiku, something I've always meant to.
Built the USB stick, which booted fine and quick, seems to be a very small OS. Installed it into a logical partition that I had previously partitioned from OS/2 as a FAT32 volume.
Airboot failed to boot it, just showing some garbage characters. I then added it to my Grub2 installed in /boot for Mint and tried that, just silence and no boot like the Haiku partition didn't have a bootable EBR installed.
This was the 64bit build, perhaps I'll try the 32 bit build later. If nothing else, it should be a light weight OS to try running in Vbox.

Mathias

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Re: Triple OS setup?
« Reply #6 on: September 03, 2020, 05:12:53 pm »
Oups.. good point in loading a kernel in the first place, and even another kernel when the primary one fails.
So.. yes.. only choice ultra fast 2 second delay when choosing. : ]