You will need an AmigaDOS hard drive prep tool to prepare you hard drives for use with OpenBSD/amiga. HDToolBox is provided with the system software and on floppy installation disks since Release 2.0 of AmigaDOS so we will provide instructions for its use. Preparing you hard disk with HDToolBox: A full explanation of HDToolBox can be found with your AmigaDOS manuals and is beyond the scope of this document. Note you will be modifying your HD's if you mess something up here you could lose everything on all the drives that you configure. It is therefore advised that you: Write down your current configurations. Do this by examining each partition on the drive and the drives parameters (from Change drive type.) Back up the partitions you are keeping. What you need to do is partition your drives; creating at least root, swap and /usr partitions and possibly some more for /tmp, /var, /home or others of your own choice. (The root and swap partitions must be on the same drive for your initial installation. You can use other configurations after building a customized kernel once your system is running.) Partitioning is traditionally an area of great confusion and disagreement, and religion plays a large role in most advice you'll get. The author of this paragraph is a fan of large and few partitions, normally one per disk, unless it's the root disk, where I tend to have /, swap, /tmp, /var & /usr. I must admit that I step aside from my normal rules of thumb very often due to the context the machine will work in. This should be done as the HDToolBox manual describes. One thing to note is that if you are not using a Commodore controller you will need to specify the device your SCSI controller uses e.g. if you have a Warp Engine you would: from cli, hdtoolbox warpdrive.device from wb set the tooltype, SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=warpdrive.device The important things you need to do above and beyond normal partitioning includes (from Partition Drive section): Marking all OpenBSD partitions as non-bootable. Changing the file system parameters of the partitions to OpenBSD ones. This must be done from the partitioning section and `Advanced options' must be enabled. To Make the needed changes: - Click the `Adv. Options' button - Click the `Change filesystem' button - Choose `Custom File System' - Turn off `Automount' if on. - Set the dostype to one of these three choices: root partition : 0x4e425207 swap partition : 0x4e425301 other partitions: 0x4e425507 Here `other' refers to other partitions you will format for reading and writing under OpenBSD (e.g. /usr) Make sure you hit the return key to enter this value as some versions of HDToolBox will forget your entry if you don't. - Turn custom boot code off - Set Reserved Blocks start and end to 0. - Click Ok. Mask and maxtransfer are not used with OpenBSD. Until you compile your own kernel your swap partition must exist on the drive that also holds your root partition. Once this is done OpenBSD/amiga will be able to recognize your disks and which partitions it should use. Choosing installation root filesystem type: The OpenBSD/amiga operating system can be installed using two different root filesystems: ramdisk or miniroot. The ramdisk is strongly recommended as it requires less preparation work. However the ramdisk kernel requires that your system has at least 6MB of fastmem. The miniroot requires less (installs on a 4MB system should be possible) and has tools to make SLIP or PPP connections, which the ramdisk doesn't, however you need to be an experienced user to make use of these as the install scripts doesn't deal with them. Furthermore the miniroot install requires you to do the preparation described in the following paragraph. To use the ramdisk install you should get the bsd.rd kernel as well as the standard bsd one, and *do* skip the next section! Transferring the miniroot filesystem: The OpenBSD/amiga installation or upgrade can use a "miniroot" fileystem which is installed on the partition used by OpenBSD for swapping. Once the hard disk has been prepared for OpenBSD, the miniroot filesystem (miniroot21.fs) is transferred to the swap partition configured during the hard disk prep (or the existing swap partition in the case of an upgrade). The xstreamtodev utility provided in the "amiga/utilities" directory can be used on AmigaDOS to transfer the filesystem for either a new installation or an upgrade. The filesystem can also be transferred on an existing OpenBSD (or NetBSD) system for an update by using dd. This should only be done after booting the former OS into single- user state. It may also be possible to shutdown to single-user, providing that the single-user state processes are not using the swap partition. On AmigaDOS, the command: xstreamtodev --input=miniroot21.fs --rdb-name= where is the name you gave to the OpenBSD partition to be used for swapping. If xstreamtodev is unable to determine the SCSI driver device name or the unit number of the specified partition, you may also need to include the option "--device=" and/or "--unit=". To transfer the miniroot using an older BSD, you should be booted up in single user state on the current system, or use the "shutdown now" command to shutdown to single-uyser state. Then copy the miniroot using dd: dd if=miniroot21.fs of=/dev/rsdXb where /dev/rsdXb should be the device path of the swap partition your system is configured to use. Once the file is copied, reboot back to AmigaDOS to boot the new OpenBSD kernel. NOTE: the release kernel is a "generic" kernel, and requires that the swap partition be on the same device as the root partition.