Configuring GRUB

Booting Haiku alongside your other operating systems is easy.

GRUB

GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) is an open source and extremely flexible boot manager commonly used to boot Linux systems.

GRUB 2 (version 1.96 and higher)

In the example below we will have the following setup:

hd0 -- first hard drive
hd0,1 -- first partition of first drive (sda1) Ubuntu Linux /
hd0,2 -- second partition of first drive (sda2) Ubuntu Linux Swap
hd0,3 -- third partition of first drive (sda3) Haiku partition

Adding Haiku to your GRUB 2 boot loader is as simple as adding a section to the files used to auto-generate your GRUB 2 menu configuration.

If you previously had only one operating system installed on your computer, GRUB 2 may be configured to wait for the Shift key to be pressed while booting, otherwise no boot menu may be displayed at all, since Haiku is not automatically recognized as a bootable operating system. To force GRUB 2 to always display the selection menu, and to add the Haiku entry in such a way that it will not be removed when the GRUB 2 configuration file is regenerated, perform the following steps:

• Edit /etc/default/grub and make sure the line "GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0" is commented out.
• Edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom and add the following entry:

menuentry "Haiku R1A2" {
set root=(hd0,3)
chainloader +1
}

Of course the partition in the entry (hd0,3) needs to point to the one where you actually installed Haiku. Now you can regenerate the boot menu configuration by issuing the command:

sudo update-grub

GRUB Legacy (version 0.97 and earlier)

GRUB Legacy differs in the numbering of the partitions compared to GRUB 2, starting at 0 instead of 1. The example below shows the naming scheme for GRUB Legacy:

hd0 -- first hard drive
hd0,0 -- first partition of first drive (sda1) Ubuntu Linux /
hd0,1 -- second partition of first drive (sda2) Ubuntu Linux Swap
hd0,2 -- third partition of first drive (sda3) Haiku partition

Adding Haiku to your GRUB Legacy boot loader is as simple as adding a new section to your GRUB menu configuration. After installing Haiku, you will need to boot into your Linux operating system and add the following block of code to your /boot/grub/menu.lst (your mileage may vary, this is the default location however).

# for Haiku
title Haiku R1A2
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1