prep revision 1.6 1 $NetBSD: prep,v 1.6 1998/01/09 18:46:42 perry Exp $
2
3 Find your favorite disk partitioning utility. Any formatter capable of
4 partitioning a SCSI disk should work. Some of the ones that have been
5 tried and seem to work are:
6
7 Apple HD SC Setup
8 Hard Disk ToolKit from FWB
9 SCSI Director Lite
10 Disk Manager Mac from OnTrack
11 Silverlining from LaCie
12 APS Disk Tools
13
14 Apple's HD SC Setup is probably the easiest to use and the most commonly
15 available. Instructions for patching HD SC Setup so that it will recognize
16 non-Apple drives is available at:
17
18 http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/patch.html
19
20 First, you need to choose a drive on which to install NetBSD. Try to pick a
21 drive with a low SCSI ID number, especially if you are likely to add or
22 remove drives to your SCSI chain in the future.
23
24 NOTE: BE SURE YOU HAVE A RELIABLE BACKUP OF ANY DATA WHICH YOU MAY WANT TO
25 KEEP. REPARTITIONING YOUR HARD DRIVE IS AN EXCELLENT WAY TO DESTROY
26 IMPORTANT DATA.
27
28 Second, decide how you want to set up your partitions. At minimum, you
29 need a partition to hold the NetBSD installation (the root partition) and a
30 partition to serve as swap. You may choose to use more than one partition
31 to hold the installation. This allows you to separate the more vital
32 portions of the filesystem (such as the kernel and the /etc directory) from
33 the more volatile parts of the filesystem. Typical setups place the /usr
34 directory on a separate partition from the root partition. Generally, the
35 root partition can be fairly small while the /usr partition should be
36 fairly large. If you plan to use this machine as a server, you may also
37 want a separate /var partition.
38
39 Once you have decided how to lay out your partitions, you need to calculate
40 how much space to allocate to each partition. A minimal install of NetBSD
41 (i.e. netbsd.tgz, base.tgz, and etc.tgz) should fit in a 30M partition.
42 For a full installation, you should allocate at least 80M. A general rule
43 of thumb for sizing the swap partition is to allocate twice as much swap
44 space as you have real memory. Having your swap + real memory total at
45 least 20M is also a good idea. Systems that will be heavily used or that
46 are low on real memory should have more swap space allocated. Systems that
47 will be only lightly used or have a very large amount of real memory can
48 get away with less.
49
50 Next, use your favorite partitioning utility to make partitions of the
51 necessary sizes. You can use any type of partition, but partitions of type
52 "Apple_Free" might save you some confusion in the future.
53
54 You are now set to install NetBSD on your hard drive.
55