{"slug": "installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer", "title": "Installer suggestion: adding automatic EFI \"installer\"", "summary": "The article suggests adding an automatic EFI installer to Haiku's installation process, as users currently must manually select \"Tools > Install EFI\" after installation. The author proposes running the EFI install program in the background upon installation completion, but acknowledges the challenge of handling multiple EFI partitions or complex multiboot setups. The current default is to do nothing to avoid accidentally breaking existing boot configurations, and more code is needed to safely detect and manage existing systems before automation can be implemented.", "body_md": "Hello Haiku users. I recently tried and installed Haiku, and I noticed a key frustration: there is no automatic EFI installer. Users have to manually select Tools > Install EFI. While it’s intuitive enough, it left me wondering why this couldn’t be implemented automatically.\nMy suggestion is to run the EFI install program in the background as soon as the main installation finishes. If you’re wondering how this could be implemented, perhaps the system could detect if the user has an EFI partition and then run an auto-installer with logs and a progress bar.\nThe problem is the same than with old mbr method. You can have an ESP partition on each disk that you have in your system and this includes removable disks (cd, dvd or usb keys). Add to that EFI folders that are not on dedicated partition. If the installer find several EFI folders, what should it do? Installing in first location found is not always the thing to do. Asking the user, will not be automatic either.\nWhen you select the drive for Haiku, the installer saves that location (e.g /dev/disk/nvme/0/0/0 is your BFS partition, while /dev/disk/nvme/0/0/1 is your ESP.) It then looks for a FAT32 partition. If there are multiple for whatever reason it’ll prompt you to select one, and the chance that it finds multiple bootloaders (like Windows or Linux), it creates a “Haiku” folder and sets it as the first boot option, prompting you to confirm. If the EFI partition is empty (e.g., freshly formatted), it creates an EFI/BOOT/ folder, adds BOOTX64.EFI, and makes the partition bootable. And my apologies, I meant it to be semi-automatic.\nThe problem is not technical (as there is a menu to do it, it would be easy to trigger it automatically).\nThe problem is we don’t assume anything about the existing setup. Maybe the user has a complex setup with GRUB and multibooting dozen of systems that they want to keep. Maybe they use rEFInd. Maybe they are trying to get rid of these things and get just Haiku booting (that’s what the existing menu will do).\nTo avoid making any other possibly existing system unbootable by accident, currently the default action is to do nothing. We may need a bit more code to detect what’s installed, and offer to keep or remove it. Then we can trigger that automatically during the install process without too much risk of breaking existing systems.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer", "canonical_source": "https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer/19220#post_7", "published_at": "2026-05-18 22:45:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-19 22:06:52.482481+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["open-source", "developer-tools", "products"], "entities": ["Haiku", "EFI", "Windows", "Linux"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/installer-suggestion-adding-automatic-efi-installer.jsonld"}}