Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 3: DragonFly Installation

By Micho Durdevich <micho@matem.unam.mx>

The procedure to prepare the bootable installation CD is virtually identical to FreeBSD 4.11. To boot the Netvista kernel from CD, exit to the loader prompt and then:

unload
boot kernel.ns40

For the sake of completeness, let us take an overview of a manual installation of DragonFly, which will use the whole hard disk space. More detailed explanations on installing DragonFly can be found in the DragonFly Handbook. We first initialize the MBR for a dedicated disk, and create the BSD slice with the appropriate disk label. As in the case of FreeBSD, we use the custom-prepared bootstraps, without any A20 subroutine.

fdisk -I ad0
disklabel -w -B -b /boot/boot1.ns40 -s /boot/boot2.ns40 ad0s1 auto
disklabel -e ad0s1

Here is a sample partition section of the label data:

    size  offset   fstype         [fsize     bsize     bsp/cpg]
a:  256m    0      4.2BSD           1024      8192        128
b:  512m    *      swap
c: <should be left as-it-is>
d:  256m    *      4.2BSD           1024      8192        128
e: 4096m    *      4.2BSD           2048     16384        128
f:     *    *      4.2BSD           2048     16384        128

Format the created partitions (-U turns the softupdates on):

newfs /dev/ad0s1a
newfs -U /dev/ad0s1d
newfs -U /dev/ad0s1e
newfs -U /dev/ad0s1f

Create the mount points and copy the relevant files from the installation CD:

mount /dev/ad0s1a /mnt
mkdir /mnt/var /mnt/usr /mnt/home

mount /dev/ad0s1d /mnt/var
mount /dev/ad0s1e /mnt/usr

cpdup -vvv / /mnt
cpdup -vvv /etc /mnt/etc
cpdup -vvv /dev /mnt/dev

cpdup -vvv /var /mnt/var
cpdup -vvv /usr /mnt/usr

The -vvv switch is used to display all objects as they are copied. Furthermore, we have to create the appropriate fstab file in /mnt/etc. The one associated to the above mentioned disklabel looks like:

# Device       Mountpoint      Fstype  Options         Dump    Pass#

/dev/ad0s1b      none           swap    sw              0       0
/dev/ad0s1a      /              ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/ad0s1d      /var           ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/ad0s1e      /usr           ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/ad0s1f      /home          ufs     rw              2       2

Finally, let us adjust our kernel so that the Netvista will boot properly by default.

cd /mnt
mv kernel kernel.ORIGINAL
mv kernel.ns40 kernel
rm boot/loader.conf

At this point the Netvista should be ready to happily boot the fresh DragonFly installation.