xref: /src/distrib/notes/i386/install

0. Introduction

	Using "sysinst", installing NetBSD is a relatively easy process.  You
	still should read this document and have it in hand when doing the
	installation process. This document tries to be a good guideline
	for the installation and as such covers many details to be complete.
	Do not let this discourage you, the install program is not hard
	to use.

0.1 Possible PCMCIA issues

	There is a serious bug that may make installation of NetBSD on PCMCIA
	machines difficult. This bug does not make USE of PCMCIA difficult  
	once a machine is installed. If you do not have PCMCIA on your
	machine (PCMCIA is only really used on laptop machines), you
	can skip this section, and ignore the "[PCMCIA]" notes.

	This will explains how to work around the installation problem.
	It is anticipated that this bug will be fixed by NetBSD 1.4
   
	What is the bug: The kernel keeps careful track of what interrupts
	and i/o ports are in use during autoconfiguration. It then allows
	the PCMCIA devices to pick unused interrupts and ports.
	Unfortunately, not all devices are included in the INSTALL
	kernels in order to save space. Let's say your laptop has a
	soundblaster device built in. The INSTALL kernel has no sound
	support. The PCMCIA code might allocate your soundblaster's IRQ
	and i/o ports to PCMCIA devices, causing them not to work. This
	is especially bad if one of the devices in question is your
	ethernet card.

	This problem will impact some, but not all, users of PCMCIA. If
	this bug is hurting you, watch the "[PCMCIA]" notes that will
	appear in this document.

1. General

	The following is a walk-through of the steps you will take while
	getting NetBSD installed on your hard disk.  sysinst is a menu driven
	installation system that allows for some freedom in doing the
	installation.  Sometimes, questions will be asked and in many cases
	the default answer will be displayed in brackets ("[]") after the
	question.  If you wish to stop the installation, you may hit Control-C
	at any time, but if you do, you'll have to begin the installation
	process again from scratch.

2. Booting NetBSD

	[PCMCIA]: unplug your PCMCIA devices, so that they won't be
	found by NetBSD.

        Boot your machine using the boot floppy.  The boot loader will
        start, and will print a countdown and begin booting. You will
        likely see one "file not found" warning from the boot loader
        -- ignore this as it is normal, and indicates the boot loader
        failed to find a normal kernel to boot before trying to boot a
        compressed kernel.

        If the boot loader messages do not appear in a reasonable
        amount of time, you either have a bad boot floppy or a
        hardware problem.  Try writing the install floppy image to
        a different disk, and using that.

	If that doesn't work, try booting after disabling your CPU's
	internal and external caches (if any).  If it still doesn't
	work, NetBSD probably can't be run on your hardware.  This can
	probably be considered a bug, so you might want to report it.
	If you do, please include as many details about your system
	configuration as you can.

	It will take a while to load the kernel from the floppy,
	probably around a minute or so.

	You will then be presented with the NetBSD kernel boot
	messages. This may take a little while, as NetBSD will
	be probing for a lot of types of hardware,  You may want to read the
	boot messages, to notice your disk's name and geometry.  Its name
	will be something like "sd0" or "wd0" and the geometry will be
	printed on a line that begins with its name.  As mentioned above,
	you may need your disk's geometry when creating NetBSD's partitions.
	You will also need to know the name, to tell sysinst on which disk
	to install. The most important thing to know is that
	'wd0 is NetBSD's name for your first IDE disk, wd1 the second,
	etc. 'sd0' is your first SCSI disk, sd1 the second, etc.

        Note that, once the system has finished booting, you need no
        longer leave the floppy in the disk drive. Earlier version of
        the NetBSD install floppies mounted the floppy as the system's
        root partition, but the new installation floppies use a
        ramdisk file system and are no longer dependent on the floppy
        once it has booted.

	Once NetBSD has booted and printed all the boot messages,
	you will be presented with a welcome message and a main menu.
	It will also include instructions for using the menus.

3. Network configuration

	[PCMCIA] You can skip this section, as you will only get data
	         from floppy in the first part of the install.

	If you will not use network operation during the installation,
	but you do want your machine to be configured for networking once
	it is installed, you should first go to the utilities menu, and select
	the "Configure network option". If you only want to temporarily
	use networking during the installation, you can specify these
	parameters later. If you are not using Domain Name Service (DNS),
	you can give an empty response in reply to answers relating to
	this.

4. The harddisk to install on and its parameters.

	To start the installation, select the menu option to install
	NetBSD from the main menu.

	The first thing is to identify the disk on which you want to
	install NetBSD.  sysinst will report a list of disks it finds
	and ask you for your selection.  Depending on how many disks
	are found, you may get a different message.  You should see
	disk names like "wd0", "wd1", "sd0", or "sd1".

	sysinst next tries to figure out the real and BIOS geometry
	of your disk. It will present you with the values it found,
	if any, and will give you a chance to change them.
	Please note that if you change the values, sysinst WILL ALSO
	REINITIALIZE YOUR MBR.

	You will also be asked if you want to use the last cylinder of
	the disk. Originally, the last cylinder of the disk was used for
	diagnostic purposes, but this is usually not a concern anymore
	these days. You will be able to specify whether you want to
	skip the last cylinder anyway.

	Next, depending on whether you are using a "wdX" or a "sdX" disk,
	you will either be asked for the type of disk (wdX) you are
	using or you will be asked if you want to specify a fake geometry
	for your SCSI disk (sdX).  The types of disk are be IDE, ST-506
	or ESDI.  If you're installing on an ST-506 or ESDI drive, you'll
	be asked if your disk supports automatic sector forwarding.  If you
	are SURE that it does, reply affirmatively.  Otherwise, the install
	program will automatically reserve space for bad144 tables.

5. Partitioning the disk.

5.1 Which portion of the disk to use.

	You will be asked if you want to use the entire disk or
	only part of the disk. If you decide to use the entire disk
	for NetBSD, it will be checked if there are already other
	systems present on the disk, and you will be asked to confirm
	whether you want to overwrite these.

	If you want to use the entire disk for NetBSD, you can skip
	the following section and go to section 5.3, "Editing the
	NetBSD disklabel".

5.2 Editing the Master Boot Record.

	First, you will be prompted to specify the units of size
	that you want to express the sizes of the partitions in.
	You can either pick megabytes, cylinders or sectors.

	After this, you will be presented with the current values
	stored in the MBR, and will be given the opportunity to
	change, create or delete partitions. For each partition
	you can set the type, the start and the size. Setting
	the type to 'unused' will delete a partition. You can
	also mark a partition as active, meaning that this is
	the one that the BIOS will start from at boottime.

	Be sure to mark the partition you want to boot from as active!

	After you are done editing the MBR, a sanity check
	will be done, checking for partitions that overlap.
	If everything is ok, you can go on to the next step,
	editing the NetBSD disklabel.

5.3 Editing the NetBSD disklabel.

	The partition table of a NetBSD part of a disk is called
	a 'disklabel'. There are 3 layouts for the NetBSD part
	of the disk that you can pick from: Standard, Standard
	with X and Custom. The first two use a set of default
	values (that you can change) suitable for a normal
	installation, possibly including X. The last option
	lets you specify everything yourself.

	You will be presented with the current layout of the
	NetBSD disklabel, and given a chance to change it.
	For each partition, you can set the type, offset and size,
	block and fragment size, and the mountpoint. The type
	that NetBSD uses for normal file storage is called
	"4.2BSD". A swap partition has a special type called "swap".
	You can also specify a partition as type "msdos". This
	is useful if you share the disk with MS-DOS or Windows95,
	NetBSD is able to access the files on these partitions.
	You can use the values from the MBR for the MS-DOS part
	of the disk to specify the partition of type "msdos"
	(you don't have to do this now, you can always re-edit
	the disklabel to add this once you have installed NetBSD).

	Some partitions in the disklabel have a fixed purpose.
	Partition 'a' is always the root partition, 'b' is the
	swap partition, 'c' is the entire NetBSD part of the disk,
	and 'd' is the whole disk. Partitions 'e'-'h' are available
	for other use. Traditionally, 'e' is the partition mounted
	on the /usr directory, but this is historical practice,
	not a fixed value.

	You will then be asked to name your disk's disklabel.  The
	default response is "mydisk". For most purposes this will be OK.
	If you choose to name it something different, make sure the name
	is a single word and contains no special characters.  You don't
	need to remember this name.

6. Preparing your harddisk

	YOU ARE NOW AT THE POINT OF NO RETURN.  Nothing has been
	written to your disk yet, but if you confirm that you want to
	install NetBSD, your hard drive will be modified. If you are
	sure you want to proceed, enter "yes" at the prompt.

	The install program will now label your disk and make the file
	systems you specified. The filesystems will be initialized to
	contain NetBSD bootstrapping binaries and configuration files.
	You will see messages on your screen from the various NetBSD
	disk preparation tools that are running. There should be no
	errors in this section of the installation. If there are,
	restart from the beginning of the installation process.
	Otherwise, you can continue the installation program
	after pressing 'return'.

        NOTE: In previous versions of NetBSD, the kernel from the
        install floppy was copied onto the hard drive in a special
        step. In the new install system, the kernel on the floppy is
        unsuited to being copied onto the hard drive. Instead, a new
        set, "kern", has been added which contains a generic kernel to
        be unloaded onto the drive. So, you can not boot from your
	hard drive yet at this point.

7. Getting the distribution sets.

	[PCMCIA] Load a kernel tar file (i.e. the kern.tgz set file)
	         on to your harddisk, for example by mounting the
	         harddisk first, copying the kern.tgz file from
	         floppy and unpacking it. Example:

		 mount /dev/wd0a /mnt
		 cd /mnt

		 <repeat following 3 steps until all kern.* files are there>
		 mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /mnt2
		 cp /mnt2/kern.* .
		 umount /mnt2

		 cat kern.* | tar vxzf -

		 Then halt the machine using the 'halt' command. Power
		 the machine down, and re-insert all the PCMCIA devices.
		 Remove any floppy from the floppy drive.
		 Start the machine up. After booting NetBSD, you will
		 be presented with the main sysinst menu. Choose the
		 option to re-install sets. Wait for the filesystem
		 checks that it will do to finish, and then proceed
		 as described below.


	The NetBSD distribution consists of a number of 'sets', that
	come in the form of gzipped tarfiles. A few sets must be
	installed for a working system, others are optional. At this
	point of the installation, you will be presented with a menu
	which enables you to choose from one of the following methods
	of installing the sets. Some of these methods will first
	load the sets on your harddisk, others will extract the sets
	directly.

	For all these methods, the first step is making the sets
	available for extraction, and then do the actual installation.
	The sets can be made available in a few different ways. The
	following sections describe each of those methods. After
	reading the one about the method you will be using, you
	can continue to section 8

7.1 Installation using ftp

	To be able to install using ftp, you first need to configure
	your network setup, if you haven't already at the start of
	the install procedure. sysinst will do this for you, asking you
	to provide some data, like IP number, hostname, etc. If you
	do not have name service set up for the machine that you
	are installing on, you can just press 'return' in answer
	to these questions, and DNS will not be used.

	You will also be asked to specify the host that you want
	to transfer the sets from, the directory on that host,
	and the accountname and password used to log into that
	host using ftp. If you did not set up DNS when answering
	the questions to configure networking, you will need to
	specify an IP number instead of a hostname for the ftp
	server.

	sysinst will proceed to transfer all the default set files
	from the remote site to your harddisk.

7.2 Installation using NFS

	To be able to install using NFS, you first need to configure
	your network setup, if you haven't already at the start of
	the install procedure. sysinst will do this for you, asking you
	to provide some data, like IP number, hostname, etc. If you
	do not have name service set up for the machine that you
	are installing on, you can just press 'return' in answer
	to these questions, and DNS will not be used.

	You will also be asked to specify the host that you want
	to transfer the sets from, and the directory on that host
	that the files are in. This directory should be mountable
	by the machine you are installing on, i.e. correctly
	exported to your machine.

	If you did not set up DNS when answering the questions to
	configure networking, you will need to specify an IP number
	instead of a hostname for the NFS server.


7.3 Installation from CD-ROM

	When installing from a CD-ROM, you will be asked to specify
	the devicename for your CD-ROM player (usually 'cd0'), and
	directoryname on the CD-ROM where the distribution files are.

	sysinst will then check if the files are indeed available
	in the specified location, and proceed to the actual
	extraction of the sets.

7.4 Installation from floppy

	Because the installation sets are too big to fit on one floppy,
	the floppies are expected to be filled with the split set
	files. The floppies are expected to be in MS-DOS
	format. You will be asked for a directory where the sets
	should be reassembled. Then you will be prompted to insert
	the floppies containing the split sets. This process
	will continue until all the sets have been loaded from floppy.
	

7.5 Installation from an unmounted filesystem

	In order to install from a local filesystem, you will
	need to specify the device that the filesystem resides
	on (for example 'wd1e'), the type of the filesystem,
	and the directory on the specified filesystem where the
	sets are located. sysinst will then check if it
	can indeed access the sets at that location. 

7.6 Installation from a local directoy

	This option assumes that you have already done some preparation
	yourself. The sets should be located in a directory on a
	filesystem that is already accessible. sysinst will ask you
	for the name of this directory.

8. Extracting the distribution sets

	After you the install sets containing the NetBSD distribution
	have been made available, you can either extract all the
	sets (a full installation), or only extract sets that
	you have selected. In the latter case you will be shown the
	currently selected sets, and given the opportunity to select
	the sets you want. Some sets always need to be installed
	("kern", "base" and "etc"), they will not be shown in
	this selection menu.

	Before extraction begins, you can elect to watch the files
	being extracted; the name of each file that is extracted will
	be shown.

	After all the files have been extracted, all the necessary
	device node files will be created. If you have already
	configured networking, you will be asked if you want to
	use this configuration for normal operation. If so, these
	values will be installed in the network configuration files.

9. Finalizing your installation.

	Congratulations, you have successfully installed NetBSD _VER. When
	you reboot into NetBSD, you should log in as "root" at the login
	prompt.  There is no initial password, but if you're using the
	machine in a networked environment, you should create yourself
	an account and protect it and the "root" account with good passwords.

	Some of the files in the NetBSD _VER distribution might need to be
	tailored for your site.  In particular, the /etc/sendmail.cf file will
	almost definitely need to be adjusted, and other files in /etc will
	probably need to be modified, as well.

	Some leftover files from the installation may be on your harddisk,
	depending on the procedure you followed. If you find any of
	the files, you should remove them:

		/.profile
		/.termcap
		/sysinst

	If you are unfamiliar with UN*X-like system administration, it's
	recommended that you buy a book that discusses it.