You will need an AmigaDOS hard drive prep tool to prepare you hard drives for use with NetBSD/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 at least one more for /local if you have the space. (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.) 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 NetBSD partitions as non-bootable. Changing the file system parameters of the partitions to NetBSD 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 file system' 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 NetBSD (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 NetBSD. Until you compile your own kernel your swap partition must exist on the drive that also holds your root partition. Once this is done NetBSD/Amiga will be able to recognize your disks and which partitions it should use. Transferring the miniroot file system: The NetBSD/Amiga installation or upgrade now uses a "miniroot" fileystem which is installed on the partition used by NetBSD for swapping. This removes the requirement of using a floppy disk for the file system used by the installation or upgrade process. It also allows more utilities to be present on the file system than would be available when using an 880K floppy disk. Once the hard disk has been prepared for NetBSD, the appropriate miniroot file system (inst-12.fs for a new install or upgr-12.fs for an upgrade) 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 file system for either a new installation or an upgrade. The file system can also be transferred on an existing NetBSD system for an update by using dd. This should only be done after booting NetBSD 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=inst-12.fs --rdb-name= where is the name you gave to the NetBSD partition to be used for swapping. Use upgr-12.fs if you are going to do an upgrade of an existing NetBSD system. 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 NetBSD, you should be booted up in single user state on the current NetBSD system, or use the "shutdown now" command to shutdown to single-user state. Then copy the miniroot using dd: dd if=upgr-12.fs of=/dev/rsd0b where /dev/rsd0b 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 upgrade kernel. NOTE: the release kernel is a "generic" kernel, and requires that the swap partition be on the same device as the root partition.