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I would strongly advise AGAINST running Haiku on any system which currently has any existing partition.

I made the mistake of creating a Haiku partition and building an install onto it.

Any other BFS partition I accessed ( I have four hard drives, all with BFS partitions ( 7 total ) ) had to be recovered very carefully.

Haiku could read the data fine, but BeOS could not. So I spent a week with a very buggy Haiku install creating ISOs & zip files of the data I needed, and copying them to a FAT32 partitioned hard drive.

Once I was done with that, I thought I was done, but no!

Not only did I need to recreate the file systems and structures manually ( because the BFS recover tool couldn't do it ), I had to remove every BFS image which was opened within Haiku, create numerous PhOS installs, and wipe out any file system which had come into contact with the Haiku-tainted BFS.

Of course, I guess I could have just re-imaged my drives from backup, but where is the lesson in that? :-)

I still cannot figure out how the problems actually arose. The superblocks were clean, and I regenerated new ones to be certain.

I used my advanced partitioning software to manually edit the partition tables, and I even ran sanity checks through the "corrupted" structures.

The best I can come up with has to do with incompatible "btrees" which were used to describe the contents on the partition. That would explain why BFS recover couldn't handle the task.

The oddity was that Haiku could access EVERYTHING just fine, but SkyOS's "BFS Viewer for Windows" could only read those which Haiku had tainted excepting a few which were beyond its capabilities anyway ( the program cannot properly access some partitions due to a some unintentional limitation ).

Oh well, next time I'll use one drive in the system with four BFS partitions, a PhOS install on two of them, a Scratch partition for testing, and of course the Haiku partition pre-made.

If all goes well I may re-consider keeping a more live copy on the actual machine.

Post in short:

Don't use Haiku on raw hardware unless your prepared and knowledgeable enough to manually recover your system in the event a bug occurs ( this is a standard caveat anyway, but most never pay any real attention ).

--The loon

BTW, I just discovered about a week ago ( now about 6 months after all this ) that I had to destroy the original partition on which Haiku was installed because PhOS/BeOS was messing up because of it ( I was blaming the issues on my hardware changes ).

So now, the system is finally proper again. My next move is to install MacOS X :-) If it ever finishes downloading... ( I am willing to buy MacOS X, BTW, if I can get it to work. EULAs have no legal bearing, and I'm legally allowed to do whatever I choose to make it work on my system, so all is good. :-) )

EDIT: forgot to actually type some words here and there.

Edited 2008-04-19 02:27 UTC