Note you will be modifying your HD's if you mess something up here you could lose everything on all the drives that you mess with. It is therefore advised that you: Write down your current configurations. Do this by writing down all partition info (especially their sizes). Back up the partitions you are keeping. If NetBSD has a disk of it's own, you can delay the partitioning until the installer requests you to do it. This means that you can safely skip the rest of this section. If NetBSD has to share the disk with another operating system, you must take care of partitioning your harddisk before installing NetBSD; creating space for at least root, swap and /usr partitions and possibly at least one more for /local if you have the space. Warning: The AHDI partioning function erases all partions on your harddisk even if they are not changed! I know this is rather stupid, but don't say I didn't warn you. If you want to use an AHDI partitioning sceme and you want to be able to boot directly into NetBSD, there are some constraints on the partition layout. As you might know; every hard disk has a "root sector" that contains information about the size of the hard disk and the partitions on the hard disk. The root sector can only contain the neccessary data for four partitions. Nobody thought that this limitation would cause any problems. After all, 640 KByte should be enough. As hard disk grew, it was neccessary to define more than four partitions. In order to be more or less compatible with the old format, a new type of partition entry was defined: XGM partions. An XGM partition is a "look over there" sign: Another root sector can be found at the start of the XGM partition. This root sector contains the remaining real partitions. And this is the big mystery: Partitions defined in the root sector of the hard disk are called "primary partitions", partitions defined in the root sector of an XGM partition are called "extended partitions". The bootblock will only work if the first NBD partition is a primary partition. This is not a limitation of NetBSD but a limitation of TOS/AHDI: You can only boot from primary partitions. If you are creating your partitions with HDX, you'll have to be very careful to fulfill this rule. HDX has some very strange ideas when it comes to extended partitions. Fortunately, you can edit this stuff: The "Edit partition scheme of the unit" dialog box has a button label "expert". This button is inactive unless you have defined more than four partitions. Click on it *after* you have defined the sizes of the partitions. A new dialog box appears on the screen. The left side contains two blocks of partitions: The upper block always contains the first four partitions, the lower block contains the last three partitions. If you have defined less than 7 partitions, some fields of the lower block will contain the string "unused". Some of the partitions will be displayed in reverse video: These are the extended partitions. The right side contains six possible ranges for the extended partitions. It is not possible to define your own range, you will have to use one of the schemes offered by HDX. To quote from Ghostbusters: Choose and die. The default scheme used by HDX is the first scheme: Extended partitions start with the second partition and end with the second to last partition. If you have defined 7 partitions, partitions #2 to #5 will be extended partitions, while partitions #1, #6 and #7 will be primary partitions. You can move the extended partition range by clicking on one of the buttons on the right side of the dalog box. Try to find one where your first NetBSD partition is a primary partition. Golden rules: * If the disk contains no GEMDOS partitions, don't use AHDI. Let NetBSD handle it alone. * If the disk contains one GEMDOS partition, make it partition #1 and start the extended partition range at partition #3. This allows you to boot from both the GEMDOS and the NetBSD partitions. * If the disk contains two GEMDOS partitions, use partitions #1 and #2 for GEMDOS, partition #3 for NetBSD-root. Start the extended partition range with partition #4. * If your disks contains three or more GEMDOS partitions, you are in trouble. Try using partitions #1 and #2 as the first two GEMDOS partitions. Use partition #3 as the first NetBSD partition. Start the extended partition range with partition #4. Put the other NetBSD extended partition range. Good luck, you'll need it...