Running the Sysinst Installation Program

1. 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 completed. Do not let this discourage you, the install program is not hard to use.
   

2. 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.

   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 affecting you, watch the [PCMCIA] notes that will appear in this document.

   If the kernel by default allocates an interrupt for PCMCIA which is allocated to other (typically undetected) hardware, you may use a workaround by booting the install kernel with "boot -d" to drop into DDB (the in-kernel debugger) and set pcic_isa_intr_alloc_mask to mask out the offending interrupt before continuing. By default the kernel masks out IRQ 10, and the corresponding mask is 0xfbff.
   

3. 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.
   

4. Quick install

   First, let's describe a quick install. The other sections of this document go into the installation procedure in more detail, but you may find that you do not need this. If you want detailed instructions, skip to section 3. This section describes a basic installation, using a CD-ROM install as an example.

   
   
   • What you need.

     
     

     - The distribution sets (in this example, they are on CD).
     

     - Two 1.44M 3.5" floppy disks.
     

     - A PC with a 386 or newer processor. A CD-ROM drive (SCSI or ATAPI), a harddisk and a minimum of 4Mb of memory installed.
     

     - The harddisk should have at least 70 + n megabytes of space free, where n is the number of megabytes of main memory in your system. If you wish to install the X window system as well, you will need at least 60Mb more.

     
     

   • Creating the boot floppies. You can create the floppies needed for installation under DOS or Windows. Supposing your 1.44M floppy drive is drive A:, and your CD is drive E: do the following from an MS-DOS command prompt:        e:
            cd \NetBSD-1.4.1\installation\misc
            rawrite
     When asked for a source filename, answer
            ..\floppy\boot1.fs for the first diskette and
            ..\floppy\boot2.fs for the second diskette
     When asked for a destination drive answer
            a
     
     

   • To create a bootfloppy under NetBSD or other UNIX-like system, you would type something like:
            dd if=.../boot1.fs bs=18k of=/dev/rfd0a
     
     

   • The Quick Installation

     
     

     - Insert the first boot floppy you just created. Restart the computer. When prompted, insert the second boot floppy. The main menu will be displayed.
     

     - If you wish, you can configure some network settings immediately by choosing the utilities menu and then configure network. It isn't actually required at this point, but it may be more convenient. Go back to the main menu.
     

     - Choose install
     

     - You will be guided through some steps regarding the setup of your disk, and the selection of distributed components to install. When in doubt, refer to the rest of this document for details.
     

     - After your disk has been prepared, choose CD-ROM as the medium. The default values for the path and device should be ok.
     

     - After all the files have been unpacked, go back to the main menu and select reboot, after you have removed the bootfloppy from the drive.
     

     - NetBSD will now boot. You should log in as root, and set a password for that account. You are also advised to edit the file /etc/rc.conf to match your system needs.
     

     - Your installation is now complete.
     

     - For configuring the X window system, if installed, see the files in
            /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc.
     Further information can be found on http://www.xfree86.org/

   
   

5. 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.

   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, then, the kernel boot messages will be displayed. This may take a little while also, as NetBSD will be probing your system to discover which hardware devices are installed. 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 not 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.
   

6. 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 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.
   

7. Installation drive selection and 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.

   Next, depending on whether you are using a wdx or wdx 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.
   

8. Partitioning the disk.
   
   
   • 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 Editing the NetBSD disklabel.
     

   • 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 boot time.

     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. Depending on the BIOS capabilities of your machine and the parameters of the NetBSD partition you have specified, you may also be asked if you want to install newer bootcode in your MBR. If you have multiple operating systems on the disk that you are installing on, you will also be given the option to install a bootselector, that will allow you to pick the operating system to start up when your computer is (re-)started.

     If everything is ok, you can go on to the next step, editing the NetBSD disklabel.

     
     

   • Editing the NetBSD disklabel.

     The partition table of the 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 mount point. 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.

   
   

9. Preparing your hard disk

   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 the return key.

   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.
   

10. Getting the distribution sets.

    [PCMCIA

    ] Load a kernel tar file (i.e. the kern.tgz set file) on to your hard disk, for example by mounting the hard disk 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 hard disk, 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 9
    

11. 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 account name 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 hard disk.
    

12. 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.
    

13. Installation from CD-ROM

    When installing from a CD-ROM, you will be asked to specify the device name for your CD-ROM player (usually cd0), and the directory name 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.
    

14. 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.
    

15. Installation from a local directory

    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.
    

16. Extracting the distribution sets

    After 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. This can slow down the installation process considerably, especially on machines with slow graphics consoles or serial consoles.

    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.
    

17. Finalizing your installation.

    Congratulations, you have successfully installed NetBSD1.4.1. You can now reboot the machine, and boot from harddisk.