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How about the machines which can't boot from USB and still have a floppy drive? Could a boot floppy be created with the updated code and allow booting Haiku to perform an install from the CD-ROM?
The T4x series did not have a floppy drive but could boot from an USB floppy. There are probably many other laptops from the same era which could do the same. And a boot-floppy is a lot smaller to download then a CD-ROM image even if it is compressed.
It is excellent that the Haiku team figured the issue out and fixed it quickly. I had downloaded R1A4 had had problems with systems which had no issues with R1A3.
It's mainly a concern because quite a few people try to install the OS onto their normal read-write media by booting from a CD ; obviously if the latter won't boot then they're not going to get very far at trying the OS out. In any case, the bug doesn't actually pertain to read-only vs read-write per se, it's an issue where the list of loaded images wouldn't be properly normalized because a bug in some of the hashtable iteration code would result in entries getting skipped (if you're morbidly curious about the details, see http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=ad53cd29cb74a329731b9e759... ).





Member since:
2005-07-06
Two critical bugs, only when booting from on read-only media.
What to say? A "normal" installation would be on a hard disk (partition) or an USB memory key or a virtual machine. Installing Haiku on a read-only medium is of very limited use, and in practice it's also more work and more expensive to write a CD-ROM, resulting in a slower boot-up... I don't understand why they still support read-only media and why some users insist on using them.
On the other hand, an OS that can boot from read-only media is more flexible and probably boots faster and with less chance of problems. The Haiku team strives for perfection, it seems.