NetBSD/distrib/notes/mac68k/prep
ender 5f92800c39 Add a paragraph warning the user that a MacOS partition is still necessary
for booting so completely destroying all existing partitions may be
ill-advised.

Should fix PR 6341 from John Refling (refling@comet.lbl.gov).
1999-05-31 06:54:31 +00:00

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.\" $NetBSD: prep,v 1.9 1999/05/31 06:54:31 ender Exp $
Find your favorite disk partitioning utility. Any formatter capable of
partitioning a SCSI disk should work. Some of the ones that have been
tried and seem to work are:
.Pp
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
Apple HD SC Setup
.It
Hard Disk ToolKit from FWB
.It
SCSI Director Lite
.It
Disk Manager Mac from OnTrack
.It
Silverlining from LaCie
.It
APS Disk Tools
.El
.Pp
Apple's HD SC Setup is probably the easiest to use and the most commonly
available. Instructions for patching HD SC Setup so that it will recognize
non-Apple drives is available at:
.Pp
.Lk http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/patch.html
.Pp
First, you need to choose a drive on which to install
.Nx .
Try to pick a
drive with a low SCSI ID number, especially if you are likely to add or
remove drives to your SCSI chain in the future.
.(tag Note:
.Em Be sure you have a reliable backup
.Em of any data which you may want to
.Em keep. Repartitioning your hard drive is an
.Em excellent way to destroy important data.
.tag)
.Pp
Second, decide how you want to set up your partitions. At minimum, you
need a partition to hold the
.Nx
installation (the root partition) and a
partition to serve as swap. You may choose to use more than one partition
to hold the installation. This allows you to separate the more vital
portions of the filesystem (such as the kernel and the
.Pa /etc No directory) from
the more volatile parts of the filesystem. Typical setups place the
.Pa /usr
directory on a separate partition from the root partition. Generally, the
root partition can be fairly small while the
.Pa /usr No partition should be
fairly large. If you plan to use this machine as a server, you may also
want a separate
.Pa /var No partition.
.Pp
Once you have decided how to lay out your partitions, you need to calculate
how much space to allocate to each partition. A minimal install of
.Nx
(i.e.
.Pa netbsd.tgz , base.tgz , No and
.Pa etc.tgz )
should just fit in a 32M partition.
For a full installation, you should allocate at least 95M (150M if you
wish to install the X sets as well). A general rule of thumb for sizing
the swap partition is to allocate twice as much swap space as you have
real memory. Having your swap + real memory total at least 20M is also
a good idea. Systems that will be heavily used or that are low on real
memory should have more swap space allocated. Systems that will be only
lightly used or have a very large amount of real memory can get away
with less.
.Pp
Keep in mind that
.Nx
currently requires MacOS in order to boot, so it is likely that you will
want to keep at least a minimal install of MacOS around on an HFS
partition for this purpose. The size of this partition may vary depending
on the size requirements for the version of MacOS you are using. Of
course, if you have MacOS on another hard drive or can boot from a floppy,
feel free to dedicate the entire drive to
.Nx .
.Pp
Next, use your favorite partitioning utility to make partitions of the
necessary sizes. You can use any type of partition, but partitions of type
"Apple_Free" might save you some confusion in the future.
.Pp
You are now set to install
.Nx
on your hard drive.