Markus Schatzl Written by Justin Sherrill Marked up by This document describes the installation of DragonFly BSD on a plain i386 machine. This process uses a bootable DragonFly CD, usually referred to as a 'live CD'. This CD is available at one of the current mirrors, which distribute the images by various protocols. The authorative list can be found at the DragonFly website. The DragonFly development team is working on an automatic installation tool, which simplifies the partitioning and installation processes. Until this tool is in place, the manual process here is required. Some experience with BSD-style tools is recommended. While this guide covers installing to a computer with an existing non-DragonFly operating system, take no chances! Back up any data on your disk drives that you want to save. When installing to an old machine, it may not be possible to boot from a CD. Use a bootmanager on a floppy in those cases, such as Smart Bootmanager. If DragonFly is to be the only operating system on the target computer, preparing the disk is a short and simple process. Boot with the live CD, and log in as root to reach a command prompt. First, the master boot record (MBR) must be cleared of any old information. This command clears all old data off your disk by writing zeros (if=/dev/zero) onto the system's master ata drive (of=/dev/ad0). &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=32k count=16 The now-empty disk must be formatted. While the following two commands can be issued as one, &prompt.root; fdisk -I ad0 &prompt.root; fdisk -B ad0 This example assumes that the target computer for installation has at least one operating system installed that needs to survive the installation process. A new partition for DragonFly needs to be created from the existing partition(s) that otherwise fill the disk. There must be unused space within the existing partition in order to resize it. The new partition is created from empty space in an existing partition. For example, an 18 gigabyte disk that has 17 gigabytes of existing data in the existing partition will only have 1 gigabyte available for the new partition. Partition resizing needs to be accomplished with a third-party tool. Commercial programs such as Partition Magic can accomplish these tasks. Free tools exist that can be adapted to this task, such as 'GNU parted', found on the Knoppix CD, or PAUD. Create a new partition of at least 5-6 gigabytes. It is possible to install within a smaller amount of disk space, but this will create some problems that this document does not cover. The newly created partition does not need to be formatted; the rest of the installation process treats that new partiton as a new disk. Installing DragonFly to a separate disk removes the need for partition resizing, and is generally safer when trying to preserve an existing operating system installation. This type of installation is very similar to installing DragonFly as the only operating system. The only difference is the disk named in each command. Always be sure of the target disk for any command. The newly created partition, whether part of an existing disk or on a completely new drive, needs to be formatted. The following command can interactively format your disk. &prompt.root; fdisk -u If there are multiple operating systems on the disk, pick the correct partition judging by what partitions were created earlier with a resizing tool. The 'ad0' here refers to the first disk on the first IDE bus of a computer. Increment the number if the target disk is farther down the chain. For example, the master disk on the second IDE controller would be 'ad2'. &prompt.root; boot0cfg -B ad0 &prompt.root; boot0cfg -v ad0 -s SLICE, where SLICE is a number, controls which slice on disk is used by boot0cfg to start from. By default, this number is 1, and will only need modification if a different slice contains DragonFly. If DragonFly is installed anywhere but the first partition of the disk, the device entry for that partition will have to be created. Otherwise, the device entry is automatically created. Refer to this different partition instead of the 'ad0s1a' used in later examples. &prompt.root; cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV ad0s2 The partition needs to be created on the DragonFly disk. &prompt.root; disklabel -B -r -w ad0s1 auto Using /etc/disklabel.ad0s1 as an example, issue the following command to edit the disklabel for the just-created partition. &prompt.root; disklabel -e ad0s1 Partition Size Mountpoint ad0s2a 256m / ad0s2b 1024m swap ad0s2c leave alone This represents the whole slice. ad0s2d 256m /var ad0s2e 256m /tmp ! ad0s2f 8192m /usr - This should be at least 4096m ad0s2g * /home - This holds 'everything else' newfs will format each individual partition. &prompt.root; newfs /dev/ad0s1a &prompt.root; newfs -U /dev/ad0s1d &prompt.root; newfs -U /dev/ad0s1e &prompt.root; newfs -U /dev/ad0s1f &prompt.root; newfs -U /dev/ad0s1g The root partition does not need softupdates; the -U option is not used. The command listing skips directly from ad0s1a to ad0s1d. This is because /dev/ad0s1b is used as swap and does not require formatting; ad0s1c refers to the entire disk and does not need to be formatted.