Making a Haiku USB Stick

Using a USB flash drive is one of the best ways to install Haiku. It is also the only way to really try and enjoy all the features of Haiku without touching your hard drives. The Haiku live CD is limited by the slow access time of CD's and, as of R1/alpha1, still lacks a few features due to the added complexity to run on a read-only media. Note that running off a USB flash drive might still be a lot slower than a real hard drive depending on your model.

In the following guide, we will just copy a raw disk image directly to the raw drive, not to a partition, replacing everything including the MBR, destroying all the partitions that were on there. This is destructive and you won't be able to use the remaining space on that drive, you are limited to the size of the image.

Once this is done, you'll be able to either use Haiku directly or make a real install by running Installer (found in the Applications menu).

First, be sure you have a computer that supports booting off of USB flash drives. That shouldn't be a problem on most recent computers.

Start by downloading a raw disk image from the download page. Get a sufficiently big USB flash drive (at least the size of the unzipped raw image), then depending on your operating system, follow one of the methods below.

Linux/FreeBSD

Open a terminal.

Find the device name of your USB flash drive by typing this command:

sudo fdisk -l

This will output the device name of the disks present on your system. You can guess the name by looking at the drive size or by executing this command before and after plugging your USB flash drive.

Ensure the USB device is unmounted,

umount /dev/sd[x]

and then issue the following command.

Be sure to verify by all means that it is the correct device name as the following command will erase everything on that drive!

dd if=path/to/haiku.image of=/dev/sd[x] bs=1M

Where haiku.image is the path to the raw image file and /dev/sd[x] is your USB device. *Make sure to use /dev/sdx and not /dev/sdx1. This is a very common error!

Haiku/BeOS

Open a terminal.

Find the device name of your USB flash drive by typing this command:

ls /dev/usb

This will list the device name of the usb disks present on your system. You can guess the name by executing this command before and after plugging your USB flash drive.

The device name looks like this: /dev/disk/usb/[x]/0/raw where x is the disk number. ("/0/raw" represents the entire disk and not a partition of it)

Ensure the USB device is unmounted using the Mount context menu of Tracker, and then issue the following command.

Be sure to verify by all means that it is the correct device name as the following command will erase everything on that drive!

dd if=path/to/haiku.image of=/dev/disk/usb/[x]/0/raw bs=1M

Where haiku.image is the path to the raw image file and /dev/disk/usb/[x]/0/raw is your USB device.

Windows

Get dd for windows (http://www.chrysocome.net/dd)

Start a command line console (StartMenu->Run..->"cmd")

Find the device name of your USB flash drive by typing this command:

dd --list --filter=removable

This will output the device name of the removable disks present on your system. You can guess the name by looking at the drive size or by executing this command before and after plugging your USB flash drive.

The device name looks like this: \\?\Device\Harddisk[x]\Partition0 where x is the disk number. (Partition0 always represents the entire disk and not a real partition)

Be sure to verify by all means that it is the correct device name as the following command will erase everything on that drive!

dd if=path/to/haiku.image of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 bs=1M --progress --size

Where haiku.image is the path to the raw image file and \\?\Device\Harddisk[x]\Partition0 is your USB device.

If you'd like to unplug the USB flash drive, be sure to eject it properly using the usual "Safely remove device" button in the task bar.

MacOSX

Open a Terminal (under Utilities)

Find the device name of your USB flash drive by typing this command:

diskutil list

This will output the device name of the disks present on your system. You can guess the name by looking at the drive size or by executing this command before and after plugging your USB flash drive.

Be sure to unmount the drive:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk[x]

Where [x] is the disk number of your USB flash drive as found previously

Be sure to verify by all means that it is the correct device name as the following command will erase everything on that drive!

sudo dd if=path/to/haiku.image of=/dev/disk[x] bs=1m

If you'd like to unplug the USB flash drive, be sure to eject it properly:

diskutil eject /dev/disk[x]