Chapter 3: Dedicated Installation

Overview

Bootable floppy,
CD-ROM or FTP,
hard drive comes to life

Armed with your OpenBSD software and a computer with supported hardware, you are now ready to face an actual installation. We will cover a full installation on the i386 architecture via CD-ROM and FTP/HTTP. (We'll cover installing from a hard disk in Chapter 4, as you won't be using that method unless you're using multiple operating systems.) You may or may not need to use a floppy disk to boot your system, so be sure you have one handy just in case.

If OpenBSD is one of several operating systems you plan to install on this machine, you still need to read this chapter. While the next chapter covers the issues involved with sharing a hard drive between OpenBSD and several other operating systems, it does not discuss actually installing OpenBSD! You'll want to understand OpenBSD's standalone installation process before beginning to install on a multiboot system.

Before you install, be absolutely certain that any data you have on this machine is backed up elsewhere! When you install OpenBSD and use the entire hard drive, as we're doing in this chapter, you will reformat the hard disk; you'll lose any data on the hard drive.

The first thing you need to do is check your hardware and prepare your BIOS.