Haiku, cont.
I slept until almost 4:00 this morning, and I feel great today. I feel almost like a kid of 60 again. I'm ready to take one last shot at getting Haiku installed on the VM I created for it.
I've been told that I might need to mount the disks before I can format them and continue. That's not mentioned in any of the instructions I've seen, but @elfprince is the only one I know who has gotten this distro installed before, and if he says that's what it takes, it's worth a try. And it wouldn't be the first time written instructions had left something out. I've seen plenty of poorly written documentation in my time.
In the Partition menu, there's a Mount all item that's enabled no matter what was selected before opening that menu -- whether it was one of the drives or one of the partitions. I choose one for the CD-Rom drive. Since the partitions to be formatted require different formats, it makes sense that I need to select one of those first, so the installer knows which partition is to be formatted, and thus which drive format to use. I've selected the partition in the CD-Rom drive that needs the Be file system format. That's the one with the little orange maple leaf image next to it. Then I click the [Partition] button at the top in order to open the menu there, and click the Mount all menu item. Et voila! The Format item is still disabled. But now the second partition in the CD-Rom drive also has a little pencil icon next to it, so maybe something actually has happened. Maybe the partitions are now both mounted and I can move on and format them?
This leads me to believe that the master 0 partition was mounted before, by the installer, and now the master 1 partition is also mounted. That makes sense, since I just told the installer to Mount all. But no. When I look at the Partition menu again, the Format item is still disabled.
As it was before I did all this, the only way to enable the Format menu itrem is to first select a drive, not a partition. So all I can do at this point is to select the CD-Rom drive in the list below, open the Partition menu, select Format, pick the Be File System format, and I already know what's going to happen when I do that, 'cause I've been here before.
Right. We continue on, supposedly to format some partition (that we don't know) with the Be file system format.
I'll skip the rest of the confirmations now, because we've seen them all before, and just skip to the error message at the end. Remember this? The formatting code doesn't have any idea which partition it's supposed to format, because we've selected a drive, to format, not a partition. And we had to do that in order to to enable the Format item from the Partition menu.
I can only assume that @elfprince must have done something else by accident, back then -- that he no longer remembers today -- in order to get this system installed on his VM. But apparently that same accident hasn't befallen me. Another possibility is that it was a different version of Haiku that he worked with back then, and this one is simply flawed. After all, we saw the message saying that it's a beta version, so we can expect that not everything will be working right. Why even a beta version should be released that can't be installed on anything is beyond me, but we were warned, after all.
So, now I must bid Haiku a fond adieu, and move on. All this effort hasn't been totally wasted -- I was able to take a look at the live session a while back. It does have a shortcut icon to install the OS. Unfortunately that just starts the same process we've seen, with the same result at the end, but at least I got to see the Haiku main window and the set of shortcut icons there.