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UEFI Booting Haiku

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UEFI Booting the Anyboot Image

Haiku also supports booting via the traditional BIOS boot system. See the regular install instructions if your hardware requires a BIOS boot process. Use the instructions on this page should your hardware require a UEFI boot process. The instructions are somewhat manual at the present time (R1/beta5), but should be enhanced with a more guided process in the future.

Install Steps

The following steps assume a fresh installation where the local disk will be used in its entirety for Haiku. The process below will completely wipe the target disk! Back up any data you still need.

  1. Follow the instructions of the installation guide and instead of opting to begin the install, choose Try Haiku and proceed with the instructions below.
  2. Once the system has booted from the install media, open the Drive Setup application.
  3. Use the Disk > Initialize > GUID Partition Map… option to initialize the disk.
  4. Create a UEFI boot partition
    1. Create a 64 MiB partition of type EFI system data with name EFIBOOT by choosing the Empty space associated with the disk and choosing Partition > Create…
    2. Format the partition as FAT32 File System with a label EFIBOOT by choosing the partition and choosing Partition > Format > FAT32 File System.
  5. Create a Haiku partition
    1. Create a large partition (> 8 GiB suggested) of type Be File System with a name of your choice.
    2. Format the partition as Be File System with a label of your choice.
  6. Copy the boot software into the EFIBOOT partition.
    1. In the DriveSetup application, select the EFIBOOT partition and mount it by choosing Partition > Mount.
    2. Open the Terminal application.
    3. Execute the commands; 
      mkdir -p /EFIBOOT/EFI/BOOT
cp /system/data/platform_loaders/haiku_loader.efi /EFIBOOT/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
    4. Press CTRL-D to close the terminal.
  7. Install Haiku onto the system
    1. Open the Installer application.
    2. Select your Be File System setup earlier as the Onto field
    3. Choose Begin
    4. Once the installation is complete, choose Quit to close the Installer.
  8. Shutdown the system.
  9. Remove the boot media; for example the USB key.
  10. Restart the system.

Advanced Install

To have Haiku on a system shared with multiple EFI operating systems, you can use this more advanced layout on the EFIBOOT partition:

  • EFI (directory)
    • HAIKU (directory)
      • BOOTX64.EFI (Haiku’s UEFI loader, aka haiku_loader.efi)
    • BOOT (directory)
      • BOOTX64.EFI (boot mananger such as rEFInd)

In this configuration, rEFInd will boot first by default, and will detect HAIKU as a boot option.