dnl $OpenBSD: prep,v 1.2 2004/02/07 22:47:49 miod Exp $ NOTE: If you wish to install OpenBSD on your whole disk, i.e. you do not want any other operating system to reside on your hard disk, you can skip this section and go on to the section that describes installation, below. dnl If you're upgrading your system from a previous release of OpenBSD, you dnl should have proceeded directly to the section about upgrading; you need dnl none of the information presented here. First and foremost, before beginning the installation process, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A RELIABLE BACKUP of any data on your hard disk that you wish to keep. Repartitioning your hard disk is an excellent way to destroy important data. Second, if you are using a disk controller which supports disk geometry translation, be sure to use the same parameters for OpenBSD as for the other operating systems installed on your disk. If you do not, it will be much harder to make OpenBSD properly coexist with them. dnl dnl All this text below is probably completely unapplicable to amd64, dnl as they don't have BIOS that old and crappy... dnl dnl Utilities exist which will print out the disk geometry which DOS sees; dnl some versions of DOS "fdisk" also do this. If you have an "EIDE" hard dnl disk, DOS and OpenBSD probably won't see the same geometry, and you must dnl be careful to find out the DOS geometry and tell OpenBSD about it during dnl the installation. dnl dnl Third (but related to the second point above), if you are using a hard dnl disk with more sectors than DOS or your controller's BIOS supports without dnl some kind of software translation utility or other kludge, you MUST dnl BE SURE that all partitions which you want to boot from must start and end dnl below cylinder 1024 by the BIOS's idea of the disk, and that all DOS dnl partitions MUST EXIST ENTIRELY BELOW cylinder 1024, or you will either not dnl be able to boot OpenBSD, not be able to boot DOS, or you may experience dnl data loss or filesystem corruption. Be sure you aren't using geometry dnl translation that you don't know about, but that the DOS "fdisk" program dnl does! dnl dnl The OpenBSD root partition must also reside completely within the BIOS dnl supported part of the hard disk -- this would typically be 504M, 2G or 8G, dnl depending upon the age of the machine and its BIOS. dnl Fourth, use the other operating system's "fdisk" program or partition Third, use the other operating system's "fdisk" program or partition editor to create at least one of the partitions to be used for that operating system. If that operating system is already set up to use the entire disk, you will have to back it up, remove and recreate a smaller partition for it, and then restore the data from that partition. You do not have to create an OpenBSD partition at this time, the OpenBSD install- ation will give you an opportunity to create the partition needed for OpenBSD. Finally, do whatever is necessary to restore order to the partition you took space away from. Most operating systems will need to reformat the partition, and if it was their "main" partition, will probably need to be reinstalled. dnl dnl Don't advertize fips on amd64. dnl dnl Once you've backed all your data up, there is a tool called fips 2.0 dnl that can shrink your FAT-based DOS/Windows partition to make room for dnl OpenBSD. It is included in the MACHINE tools area of this distribution as dnl a convenience. It is strongly advised that you read its documentation dnl and understand the consequences of your actions before using it. In some dnl cases, defragmenting your disk and running fips may be much faster than dnl reinstalling your DOS partition from the backup. dnl Your hard disk is now prepared to have OpenBSD installed on it, and you should proceed with the installation instructions.