Installing FreeBSD

Partitioning the disk

The first installation step is to set up space for FreeBSD on the disk. We looked at the technical background in Chapter 2, on page 39. In this section only, we’ll use the term partition to refer to a slice or BIOS partition, because that's the usual terminology.

Even if your disk is correctly partitioned, select the Partition menu: the installation routines need to enter this screen in order to read the partition information from the disk. If you like what you see, you can leave again immediately with q (quit), but you must first enter this menu. If you have more than one disk connected to your machine, you will next be asked to choose the drives that you want to use for FreeBSD.

#isDisk selection menu

This screen shows entries for each drive that sysinstall has detected; in this example, the system has one ATA (IDE) drive, /dev/ad0, and one SCSI drive, Dao. You only get this screen if you have at least two drives connected to your machine; otherwise sysinstall automatically goes to the next screen.

If you intend to use more than one disk for FreeBSD, you have the choice of setting up all disks now, or setting the others up after the system is up and running. We'll look at the latter option in Chapter 11 , on page 199.

To select the disk on which you want to install FreeBSD, move the cursor to the appropriate line and press the space bar. The screen you get will probably look like Figure 5-5. Table 5-1 explains the meanings of the columns in this display. The first partition contains the Master Boot Record, which is exactly one sector long, and the bootstrap, which can be up to 15 sectors long. The partitioning tools use the complete first track: in this case, the geometry information from BIOS says that it has 63 sectors per track.

In this case, the Microsoft file system uses up the whole disk except for the last track, 1008 sectors (504 kB) at the end of the disk. Clearly there's not much left to share. We have the option of removing the Microsoft partition, which we'll look at here, or we can shorten it with FIPS.We looked at FIPS in Chapter 4, page 52, and we'll look at what to do with the resultant layout on page 66.

Don't forget that if you remove a partition, you lose all the data in it. If the partition contains anything you want to keep, make sure you have a readable backup.

You remove the partition with the d command. After this, your display looks like:

The next step is to allocate a FreeBSD partition. There are two ways to do this: if you want to have more than one partition on the drive (for example, if you share the disk with another operating system), you use the c (create) command. We'll look at that on page 66. In this case, though, you want to use the entire disk for FreeBSD, so you choose the a option. The resultant display is effectively the same as in Figure 5-5 : the only difference is that the Desc field now shows freebsd instead of fat.

That's all you need to do here: leave /disk by pressing the q key.

Don't use the W (Write Changes) command here. It's intended for use only once the system is up and running.

On a PC, the next screen asks what kind of boot selector (in other words, MBR) you want. You don't get this on an Alpha.

If you plan to have only one operating system on this disk, select Standard .If you are sharing with another operating system, you should choose BootMgr instead. We'll look at this in more detail in the section on booting the system on page 529. Exit by pressing the tab key until the OK tab is highlighted, then press Enter.

Shared partition

If you are installing on a disk shared with another operating system, things are a little different. The section continues the example started in Chapter 4 . When you enter the partition editor, you will see something like:

This display shows the two Microsoft partitions, adOsl and ad0s2,which is what you see after using FIPS; if you have just installed Microsoft on one partition, the partition ad0s2 will not be present. If it is, you first need to remove it. Be very careful to remove the correct partition. It's always the second of the two partitions, in this case ad0s2.

Remove the partition by moving the highlight to the second partition and pressing d. After this, the display looks like:

The next step is to allocate a FreeBSD partition with the c command. The menu asks for the size of the partition, and suggests a value of 35899920 sectors, the size of the unused area at the end. You can edit this value if you wish, but in this case it's what you want, so just press ENTER. You get another window asking you for the partition type, and suggesting type 165, the FreeBSD partition table. When you accept that, you get:

The new partition now has a partition type 8 and subtype 165 (0xa5), which identifies it as a FreeBSD partition.

After this, select a boot method as described on page 66 and exit the menu with the q command. There are two operating systems on the disk, so select the BootMgr option.

Defining file systems

The next step is to tell the installation program what to put in your FreeBSD partition. First, we'll look at the simple case of installing FreeBSD by itself. On page 75 we'll look at what differences there are when installing alongside another operating system on the same disk.

When you select Label, you get the screen shown in Figure 5-8 .

What partitions?

In this example, you have 20GB of space to divide up. How should you do it? You don't have to worry about this issue, since sysinstall can do it for you, but we'll see below why this might not be the best choice. In this section we'll consider how UNIX file systems have changed over the years, and we'll look at the issues in file system layout nowadays.

When UNIX was young, disks were tiny. At the time of the third edition of UNIX, in 1972, the root file system was on a Digital RF-11, a fixed head disk with 512 kB. The system was growing, and it was no longer possible to keep the entire system on this disk, so a second file system became essential. It was mounted on a Digital RK03 with 2 MB of storage. To quote from a paper published in the Communications of the ACM in July 1974:

In our installation, for example, the root directory resides on the fixed-head disk, and the large disk drive,which contains user's files, is mounted by the system initialization program...

As time went on, UNIX got bigger, but so did the disks. By the early 80s, disks were large enough to put / and /usr on the same disk, and it would have been possible to merge / and /usr, but they didn't, mainly because of reliability concerns. Since that time, an additional file system, /var, has come into common use for frequently changed data, and just recently sysinstall has been changed to create a /tmp file system by default. This is what sysinstall does if you ask it to partition automatically:

It's relatively simple to estimate the size of the root file system, and sysinstall's value of 128 MB is reasonable. But what about /var and /tmp? Is 256 MB too much or too little? In fact, both file systems put together would be lost in the 18.7 GB of /usr file system. Why are things still this way? Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages:

In the early days of UNIX, system crashes were relatively common, and the damage they did to the file systems was relatively serious. Times have changed, and nowadays file system damage is relatively seldom, particularly on file systems that have little activity. On the other hand, disk drive shave grown beyond most peoples' wildest expectations. The first edition of this book, only six years ago, showed how to install on a 200 MB drive. The smallest disk drives in current production are 20 GB in size, more than will fit on many tapes.

As a result of these considerations, I have changed my recommendations. In earlier editions of this book, I recommended putting a small root file system and a /usr file system on the first (or only) disk on the system. /var was to be a symbolic link to /usr/var.

This is still a valid layout, but it has a couple of problems:

As a result, I now recommend:

This layout allows for easy backup of the file systems, and it also allows for easy upgrading to a new system version: you just need to replace the root file system. It's not a perfect fit for all applications, though. Ultimately you need to make your own decisions.

How much swap space?

Apart from files, you should also have at least one swap partition on your disk. It's very difficult to predict how much swap space you need. The automatic option gave you 522 MB, slightly more than twice the size of physical memory. Maybe you can get by with 64 MB. Maybe you'll need 2 GB. How do you decide?

It's almost impossible to know in advance what your system will require. Here are some considerations:

A couple of examples might make this clearer:

$ pstat -s
Device      1024-blocks    Used   Avail  Capacity  Type
/dev/da0s1   122880       65148   57668   53%      Interleaved

$  pstat –s
Device      1024-blocks  Used    Avail  Capacity     Type
/dev/ad0s1b  1048576    14644   1033932    1%     Interleaved

It's not so important that the Athlon is using less swap: it's using less than 3% of its memory in swap, whereas the 486 used 4 times its memory. In a previous edition of this book, I had the example of a Pentium with 96 MB of memory, which used 43 MB of swap. Look at it from a different point of view, and it makes more sense: swap makes up for the lack of real memory, so the 486 was using a total of 80 MB of memory, the Pentium was using 140 MB, and the Athlon is using 526 MB. In other words, there is a tendency to be able to say "the more main memory you have, the less swap you need."

If, however, you look at it from the point of view of acceptable performance, you will hear things like "you need at least one-third of your virtual memory in real memory." That makes sense from a performance point of view, assuming all processes are relatively active. And, of course, it's another way of saying "take twice as much swap as real memory."

In summary: be generous in allocating swap space. If you have the choice, use more. If you really can't make up your mind, take 512 MB of swap space or 1 MB more than the maximum memory size you are likely to install.

For the file systems, the column Mount now shows the mount points, and the Newfs column contains the letters UFS1 for UNIX File System, Version 1, and the letter Y, indicating that you need to create a new file system before you can use it. At this point, you have two choices: decide for yourself what you want, or let the disk label editor do it for you. Let's look at both ways:

Creating the file systems

With these considerations in mind, we'll divide up the disk in the following manner:

To create a file system, you press c. You get a prompt window asking for the size of the file system, and offering the entire space. Enter the size of the root file system

When you press ENTER, you see another prompt asking for the kind of partition. Select A File System:

When you press ENTER,you see another prompt asking for the mount point for the file system. Enter / for the root file system, after which the display looks like:

It's not immediately obvious at this point that soft updates are not enabled for this file system. Press s to enable them, after which the entry in the Newfs column changes from UFS1 to UFSl+S. See page 191 for reasons why you want to use soft updates.

Next, repeat the operation for the swap partition and the /home file system, entering the appropriate values each time. Don't change the value offered for the length of /home: just use all the remaining space. At the end, you have:

You don't need to enable soft updates for /home; that happens automatically. That's all you need to do. Exit the menu by pressing q.

Where you are now

At this point in the installation, you have told sysinstall the overall layout of the disk or disks you intend to use for FreeBSD, and whether or how you intend to share them with other operating systems. The next step is to specify how you want to use the FreeBSD partitions. First, though, we'll consider some alternative scenarios.

Second time through

If you have already started an installation and aborted it for some reason after creating the file systems, things will look a little different when you get to the label editor. I twill find the partitions, but it won't know the name of the mount points, so the text under Mount will be <none>. Under Newfs, you will find an asterisk (*) instead of the text UFS1 Y. The label editor has found the partitions, but it doesn't know where to mount the file systems. Before you can use them, you must tell the label editor the types and mount points of the UFS partitions. To do this:

File systems on shared disks

If you have another operating system on the disk, you'll notice a couple of differences. In particular, the label editor menu of Figure 5-8 (on page 68) will not be empty: instead, you'll see something like this:

Be careful at this point. The file system shown in the list is the active Microsoft partition, not a FreeBSD file system. The important piece of information here is the fact that we have 17529 MB of free space on the disk. We'll create the file systems in that free space in the same way we saw on page 72.

Selecting distribution

The next step is to decide what to install. Figure 5-14 shows you the menu you get when you enter Distributions. A complete installation of FreeBSD uses about 1 GB of space, so there's little reason to choose anything else. Position the cursor on the line All, as shown, and press the space bar.

Next, sysinstall asks you if you want to install the Ports Collection. We'll look at the Ports Collection in Chapter 9 . You don't have to install it now, and it takes much more time than you would expect from the amount of space that it takes: the Ports Collection consists of over 150,000 very small files, and copying them to disk can take as long as the rest of the installation put together. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to do now, so if you have the time, you should install them.

Whatever you answer to this question, you are returned to the distribution menu of Figure 5-14. Select Exit, and you're done selecting your distributions.

Where you are now

Now sysinstall knows the layout of the disk or disks you intend to use for FreeBSD, and what to put on them. Next, you specify where to get the data from.

Selecting the installation medium

The next thing you need to specify is where you will get the data from. Where you go now depends on your installation medium. Figure 5-15 shows the Media menu. If you're installing from anything except an ftp server or NFS, you just need to select your medium and then commit the installation, which we look at on page 77. If you're installing from media other than CD-ROM, see page 85.

At this point, sysinstall knows everything it needs to install the software. It's just waiting for you to tell it to go ahead.

Performing the installation

So far, every thing you have done has had no effect on the disk drives. If you change your mind, you can just abort the installation, and the data on your disks will be unchanged. That changes completely in the next step, which you call committing the installation. Now is the big moment. You've set up your partitions, decided what you want to install and from where. Now you do it.

If you are installing with the Custom installation, you need to select Commit explicitly. The Standard installation asks you if you want to proceed:

Last Chance!   Are you SURE you want continue the installation?

If you're running this on an existing system, we STRONGLY
encourage you to make proper backups before proceeding.
We take no responsibility for lost disk contents!

When you answer yes, sysinstall does what we've been preparing for:

After the file systems are mounted, and before installing the software, sysinstall starts processes on two other virtual terminalsSee page 197 for an explanation of virtual terminals. On /dev/ttyvl you get log output showing you what's going on behind the scenes. You can switch to it with ALT-F2. Right at the beginning you'll see a whole lot of error messages as sysinstall tries to initialize every device it can think of. Don't worry about them, they're normal. To get back to the install screen, press ALT-F1.

In addition, after sysinstall mounts the root file system, it starts an interactive shell on /dev/ttyv3. You can use it if something goes wrong, or simply to watch what's going on while you're installing. You switch to it with ALT-F4.

After installing all the files, sysinstall asks:

Visit the general configuration menu for a chance to set
any last options?

You really have the choice here. You can answer Yes and continue, or you can reboot: the system is now run able. In all probability, though, you will have additional installation work to do, so it's worth continuing. We'll look at that in the following chapter.

Installing on an Alpha system

Installing FreeBSD on an Alpha (officially Compaq AXP) has a few minor differences due to the hardware itself. In principle, you perform the same steps to install FreeBSD on the Alpha architecture that you perform for the Intel architecture. See page 42 for some differences.

The easiest type of installation is from CD-ROM. If you have a supported CD-ROM drive and a FreeBSD installation CD for Alpha, you can start the installation by building a set of FreeBSD boot floppies from the files fbppies/kern.fp andfbppies/mfsroot.ftp as described for the Intel architecture on page 85. Use the CD-ROM marked "Alpha installation." From the SRM console prompt, insert the kern.flp floppy and type the following command to start the installation:

>>>boot dvaO

Insert the mfsroot.flp floppy when prompted and you will end up at the first screen of the install program. You can then continue as for the Intel architecture on page 59.

To install over the Net, fetch the floppy images from the ftp site, boot as above, then proceed as for the Intel architecture.

Once the install procedure has finished, you will be able to start FreeBSD/Alpha by typing something like this to the SRM prompt:

>>>boot dkcO

This instructs the firmware to boot the specified disk. To find the SRM names of disks in your machine, use the show device command:

>>>show device
dka0.0.0.4.0       DKA0   TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-57  3476
dkc0.0.0.1009.0    DKC0               RZ1BB-BS  0658
dkc100.1.0.1009.0  DKC100     SEAGATE ST34501W  0015
dva0.0.0.0.1       DVA0
ewa0.0.0.3.0       EWA0      00-00-F8-75-6D-01
pkc0.7.0.1009.0    PKC0          SCSI Bus ID 7  5.27
pqa0.0.0.4.0       PQA0               PCI EIDE

This example comes from a Digital Personal Workstation 433au and shows three disks attached to the machine. The first is a CD-ROM called dka0 and the other two are disks and are called dkc0 and dkc100 respectively.

You can specify which kernel file to load and what boot options to use with the -file and -flags options to boot:

>>>boot -file kernel.old -flags s

To makeFreeBSD/Alpha boot automatically,use these commands:

>>>set boot_osflags a
>>>set bootdef_dev dkcO
>>>set auto_action BOOT

Upgrading an old version of FreeBSD

Paradoxically, upgrading an old version of FreeBSD is more complicated than installing from scratch. The reason is that you almost certainly want to keep your old configuration. There's enough material in this topic to fill a chapter, so that's what I've done: see Chapter 31, for more details on how to upgrade a system.

How to uninstall FreeBSD

What, you want to remove FreeBSD? Why would you want to do that?

Seriously, if you decide you want to completely remove FreeBSD from the system, this is no longer a FreeBSD issue, it's an issue of whatever system you use to replace it. For example, on page 63 we saw how to remove a Microsoft partition and replace it with FreeBSD; no Microsoft software was needed to remove it. In the same way, you don't need any help from FreeBSD if you want to replace it with a different operating system.

If things go wrong

In this section, we'll look at the most common installation problems. Many of these are things that once used to happen and haven't been seen for some time: sysinstall has improved considerably, and modern hardware is much more reliable and easy to configure. You can find additional information on this topic in the section Known Hardware Problems in the file INSTALL.TXT on the first CD-ROM.

Problems with sysinstall

sysinstall is intended to be easy to use, but it is not very tolerant of errors. You may well find that you enter something by mistake and can’t get back to where you want to be. In case of doubt, if you haven't yet committed to the install, you can always just reboot.

Problems with CD-ROM installation

If you select to install from CD-ROM, you may get the message:

No CD-ROM device found

This might even happen if you have booted from CD-ROM! The most common reasons for this problem are:

Can't boot

One of the most terrifying things after installing FreeBSD is if you find that the machine just won't boot. This is particularly bad if you have important data on the disk (either another operating system, or data from a previous installation of FreeBSD).

At this point, seasoned hackers tend to shrug their shoulders and point out that you still have the backup you made before you did do the installation. If you tell them you didn't do a backup, they tend to shrug again and move on to something else.

Still, all is probably not lost. The most frequent causes of boot failure are an incorrect boot installation or geometry problems. In addition, it's possible that the system might hang and never complete the boot process. All of these problems are much less common than they used to be, and a lot of the information about how to address them is a few years old, as they haven't been seen since.

Incorrect boot installation

It's possible to forget to install the bootstrap, or even to wipe it the existing bootstrap. That sounds like a big problem, but in fact it's easy enough to recover from. Refer to the description of the boot process on page 529, and boot from floppy disk or CD-ROM. Interrupt the boot process with the space bar. You might see:

BTX loader 1.00   BTX version is 1.01
BIOS drive A: is diskO
BIOS drive C: is diskl
BIOS drive D: is disk1
BIOS 639kB/130048kB available memory

FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8
(grog@freebie.example.com, Thu Jun 13 13:06:03 CST 2002)
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf

Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.
Booting [kernel] in 6 seconds...    press space bar here
ok unload                           unload the current kernel
ok set currdev=disk1s1a             and set the location of the newone
ok load /boot/kernel/kernel         load the kernel
ok boot                             then start it

This boots from the drive /dev/ad0s1a, assuming that you are using IDE drives. The correspondence between the name /dev/ad0s1a and disklsla goes via the information at the top of the example: BTX only knows the BIOS names, so you'd normally be looking for the first partition on drive C. After booting, install the correct bootstrap with bsdlabel -B or boot0cfg, and you should be able to boot from hard disk again.

Geometry problems

Things might continue a bit further: you elect to install booteasy, and when you boot, you get the Boot Manager prompt, but it just prints F? at the boot menu and won't accept any input. In this case, you may have set the hard disk geometry incorrectly in the partition editor when you installed FreeBSD. Go back into the partition editor and specify the correct geometry for your hard disk. You may need to reinstall FreeBSD from the beginning if this happens.

It used to be relatively common that sysinstall couldn't calculate the correct geometry for a disk, and that as a result you could install a system, but it wouldn't boot. Since those days, sysinstall has become a lot smarter, but it's still barely possible that you'll run into this problem.

If you can’t figure out the correct geometry for your machine, and even if you don't want to run Microsoft on your machine, try installing a small Microsoft partition at the beginning of the disk and install FreeBSD after that. The install program sees the Microsoft partition and tries to infer the correct geometry from it, which usually works. After the partition editor has accepted the geometry, you can remove the Microsoft partition again. If you are sharing your machine with Microsoft, make sure that the Microsoft partition is before the FreeBSD partition.

Alternatively, if you don't want to share your disk with any other operating system, select the option to use the entire disk (a in the partition editor). You're less likely to have problems with this option.

System hangs during boot

A number of problems may lead to the system hanging during the boot process. All the known problems have been eliminated, but there's always the chance that something new will crop up. In general, the problems are related to hardware probes, and the most important indication is the point at which the boot failed. It's worth repeating the boot with the verbose fag: again, refer to the description of the boot process on page 529. Interrupt the boot process with the space bar and enter:

Hit [Enter] to boot immediately,  or any other key for command prompt.
Booting [kernel] in 6 seconds...     press space bar here
ok set boot_verbose                  set a verbose boot
ok boot                              then continue

This fag gives you additional information that might help diagnose the problem. See Chapter 29 for more details of what the output means.

If you're using ISA cards, you may need to reconfigure the card to match the kernel, or change the file /boot/device.hints to match the card settings. See the example on page 609. Older versions of FreeBSD used to have a program called UserConfig to perform this function, but it is no longer supported.

System boots, but doesn't run correctly

If you get the system installed to the point where you can start it, but it doesn't run quite the way you want, don't reinstall. In most cases, reinstallation won't help. Instead, try to find the cause of the problem—with the aid of the FreeBSD-questions mailing list if necessary—and fix the problem.

Root file system fills up

You might find that the installation completes successfully, and you get your system up and running, but almost before you know it, the root file system fills up. This is relatively unlikely if you follow my recommendation to have one file system for /, /usr and /var, but if you follow the default recommendations, it's a possibility. It could be, of course, that you just haven't made it big enough—FreeBSD root file systems have got bigger over the years. In the first edition of this book I recommended 32 MB "to be on the safe side." Nowadays the default is 128 MB.

On the other hand, maybe you already have an128 MB root file system, and it still fills up. In this case, check where you have put your /tmp and /var file systems. There's a good chance that they're on the root file system, and that's why it's filling up.

Panic

Sometimes the system gets into so much trouble that it can't continue. It should notice this situation and stop more or less gracefully. You might see a message like:

panic: free vnode isn't

Syncing disks 14 13 9 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 giving up

dumping to dev 20001 offset 0
dump 16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 succeeded
Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press a key on the console to abort
Reboooting...

Just because the system has panicked doesn't mean that you should panic too. It's a sorry fact of life that software contains bugs. Many commercial systems just crash when they hit a bug, and you never know why, or they print a message like General protection fault, which doesn't tell you very much either. When a UNIX system panics, it usually gives you more detailed information-in this example, the reason is free v node isn't. You may not be any the wiser for a message like this (it tells you that the file system handling has got confused about the current state of storage on a disk), but other people might. In particular, if you do get a panic and you ask for help on FreeBSD-questions, please don't just say "My system panicked, what do I do?" The first answer—if you get one— will be "What was the panic string??" The second will be "Where's the dump?"

After panicking, the system tries to write file system buffers back to disk so that they don't get lost. This is not always possible, as we see on the second line of this example. It started off with 14 buffers to write, but it only managed to write 9 of them, possibly because it was confused about the state of the disk. This can mean that you will have difficulties after rebooting, but it might also mean that the system was wrong in its assumptions about the number of buffers needed to be written.

In addition to telling you the cause of the panic, FreeBSD will optionally copy the current contents of memory to the swap file for post-mortem analysis. This is called dumping the system, and is shown on the next two lines. To enable dumping, you need to specify where the dump should be written. In /etc/defaults/rc.conf, you will find:

dumpdev="NO"         # Device name to crashdump to (if enabled)

To enable dumping, put something like this in /boot/loader.conf:

dumpdev="/dev/ad0s1b"

This enables the dumps to be taken even if a panic occurs before the system reads the /etc/rc.conf file. Make sure that the name of the dumpdev corresponds to a swap partition with at least as much space as your total memory. You can use pstat to check this:

# pstat –s
Device      1024-blocks    Used   Avail  Capacity  Type
/dev/ad0s1b       51200   50108    1028     98%    interleaved
/dev/da0s1b       66036   51356   14616     78%    interleaved
/dev/da2s1b      204800   51220  153516     25%    interleaved
Total            321844  152684  169160     47%

As long as this machine doesn't have more than about 192 MB of memory, it will be possible to take a dump on /dev/da2s1b.

In addition, ensure that you have a directory called /var/crash. After rebooting, the system first checks the integrity of the file systems, then it checks for the presence of a dump. If it finds one, it copies the dump and the current kernel to /var/crash.

It's always worth enabling dumping, assuming your swap space is at least as large as your memory. You can analyze the dumps with gdb—see page 623 for more details.

To get the best results from a dump analysis, you need a debug kernel.This kernel is identical to a normal kernel, but it includes a lot of information that can be used for dump analysis. See page 614 for details of how to build a debug kernel. You never know when you might run into a problem, so I highly recommend that you use a debug kernel at all times. It doesn't have any effect on the performance of the system.

Fixing a broken installation

A really massive crash may damage your system to such an extent that you need to reinstall the whole system. For example, if you overwrite your hard disk from start to finish, you don't have any other choice. In many cases, though, the damage is repairable. Sometimes, though, you can't start the system to fix the problems. In this case, you have two possibilities:

In either case, the hard disks aren't mounted; you might want to do repair work on them before any other access.

Use this option only if you have a good understanding of the system installation process. Depending on the damage, you may or may not be successful. If you have a recent backup of your system, it might be faster to perform a complete installation than to try to fix what's left, and after a reinstallation you can be more confident that the system is correctly installed.

Alternative installation methods

The description at the beginning of this chapter applied to the most common installation method, from CD-ROM. In the following sections we'll look at the relatively minor differences needed to install from other media. The choices you have are, in order of decreasing attractiveness:

Preparing boot floppies

If your machine is no longer the youngest, you may be able to read the CD-ROM drive, but not boot from it. In this case, you'll need to boot from floppy. If you are using 1.44 MB floppies, you will need two or three of them, the Kernel Disk and the MFS Root Disk and possibly the DriversDisk to boot the installation programs. If you are using 2.88 MB floppies or a LS-120 disk, you can copy the single Boot Disk, which is 2.88 MB long, instead of the kernel and MFS root disks. The images of these floppies are on the CD-ROM distribution in the files floppies/kern.fp, floppies/mfsroot.fp, floppies/driv-ers.flp and foppies/boot.fp respectively. If you have your CD-ROM mounted on a Microsoft system, they may be called FLOPPIESKERN.FLP, FLOPPIESMFS-ROOT.FLP, FLOPPIES\DRIVERS.FLP and FLOPPIES\BOOT.FLP respectively. The bootstrap does: not recover bad blocks, so the floppy must be 100% readable.

The way you get the boot disk image onto a real floppy depends on the operating system you use. If you are using any flavour of UNIX, just perform something like:

# dd if=/cdrom/floppies/k:erri.flp of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b
change the floppy
# dd if=/cdrom/floppies/mfsroot.flp of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b
change the floppy
# dd if=/cdrom/floppies/drivers.flp of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b

This assumes that your software is on CD-ROM, and that it is mounted on the directory /cdrom. It also assumes that your floppy drive is called /devfd 0. This is the FreeBSD name as of Release 5.0, and it's also the name that Linux uses. Older FreeBSD and other BSD systems refer to it as /dev/fd0c.

The dd implementation of some versions of UNIX, particularly older System V variants, may complain about the option bs=36b. If this happens, just leave it out. It might take up to 10 minutes to write the floppy, but it will work, and it will make you appreciate FreeBSD all the more.

If you have to create the boot floppy from Microsoft, use the program FDIMAGE.EXE, which is in the tools directory of the first CD-ROM.

Booting from floppy

In almost all cases where you don't boot from CD-ROM, you'll boot from floppy, no matter what medium you are installing from. If you are installing from CD-ROM, put the CD-ROM in the drive before booting. The installation may fail if you boot before inserting the CD-ROM.

Boot the system in the normal manner from the first floppy (the one containing the kern.flp image). After loading the kernel, the system will print the message:

Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter

After you replace the floppy and press enter, the boot procedure carries on as before.

If you're using the 2.88 MB image on a 2.88 MB floppy or an LS-120 drive, you have every thing you need on the one disk, so you don't get the prompt to change the disk. Depending on your hardware, you may later get a prompt to install additional drivers from the driver floppy.

Installing via ftp

The fun way to install FreeBSD is via the Internet, but it's not always the best choice. There's a lot of data to transfer, and unless you have a really high-speed, non-overloaded connection to the server, it could take forever. On the other hand, of course, if you have the software on another machine on the same LAN, and the system on which you want to install FreeBSD doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, these conditions are fulfilled, and this could be for you. Before you decide, though, read about the alternative of NFS installation below: if you don't have an ftp server with the files already installed, it's a ot easier to set up an NFS installation.

There are two ftp installation modes you can use:

Whichever mode of installation and whichever remote machine you choose, you need to have access to the remote machine. The easiest and most common way to ensure access is to use anonymous ftp. If you're installing from another FreeBSD machine, read how to install anonymous ftp on page 450. This information is also generally correct for other UNIX systems.

Setting up the ftp server

Put the FreeBSD distribution in the public ftp directory of the ftp server. On BSD systems, this will be the home directory of user ftp, which in FreeBSD defaults to /var/spool/ftp The name of the directory is the name of the release, which in this example we'll assume to be 5.0-RELEASE. You can put this directory in a subdirectory of /var/spool/ftp, for example /var/spool/ftp/FreeBSD/5.0-RELEASE, but the only optional part in this example is the parent directory FreeBSD.

This directory has a slightly different structure from the CD-ROM distribution. To set it up, assuming you have your distribution CD-ROM mounted on /cdrom, and that you are installing in the directory /var/spool/ftp/FreeBSD/5.0-RELEASE, perform the following steps:

# cd /var/spool/ftp/FreeBSD/5.0-RELEASE
# mkdir floppies
# cd floppies
# cp /cdrom/floppies/* .    don't omit the . at the end
# cd /cdrom                 the distribution directory on CD-ROM
# tar cf - . | (cd /var/spool/ftp/FreeBSD/5.0-EELEASE; tar xvf -)

This copies all the directories of /cdrom into /var/spool/ftp/FreeBSD/5.0-RELEASE. For a minimal installation, you need only the directory base. To just install base rather than all of the distribution, change the last line of the example above to:

# mkdir base
# cp /cdrom/base/* base

Installing via ftp

On page 77 we saw the media select menu. Figure 5-16 shows the menu you get when you select . hostname is the name of the system, in this case presto.example.org, and pathname is the path relative to the anonymous ftp directory, which on FreeBSD systems is usually /var/spool/ftp.The install program knows its version number, and it attaches it to the name you supply.

In this case, we're installing Release 5.0 of FreeBSD, and it's in the directory . The next menu asks you to configure your network. This is the same menu that you would normally fill out at the end of the installation—see page 98 for details.

This information is used to set up the machine after installation, so it pays to fill out this information correctly. After entering this information, continue with Commit (on page 77).

Installing via NFS

If you're installing from a CD-ROM drive on another system in the local network, you might find an installation via ftp too complicated for your liking. Installation is a lot easier if the other system supports NFS. Before you start, make sure you have the CD-ROM mounted on the remote machine, and that the remote machine is exporting the file system (in System V terminology, exporting is called sharing). When prompted for the name of the directory, specify the name of the directory on which the CD-ROM is mounted. For example, if the CD-ROM is mounted on directory /cdrom on the system presto.example.org, enter presto.example.org:/cdrom. That's all there is to it!

Next, you give this information to sysinstall, as shown in Figure 5-17 . After entering this information, sysinstall asks you to configure an interface. This is the same procedure that you would otherwise do after installation—see page 98. After performing this configuration, you continue with Commit (on page 77).

Installing from a Microsoft partition

On the Intel architecture you can also install from a primary Microsoft partition on the first disk. To prepare for installation from a Microsoft partition, copy the files from the distribution into a directory called C:\FREEBSD. For example, to do a minimal installation of FreeBSD from Microsoft using files copied from a CD-ROM, copy the directories floppies and base to the Microsoft directories C:\FREEBSD\FLOPPIES and C:\FREEBSD\BIN respectively. You need the directory FLOPPIES because that's where sysinstall looks for the boot.flp, the first image in every installation.

The only required directory is base. You can include as many other directories as you want, but be sure to maintain the directory structure. In other words, if you also wanted to install XF86336 and manpages, you would copy them to C:\FREEBSD\XF86336 and C:\FREEBSD\MANPAGES.

Creating floppies for a floppy installation

Installation from floppy disk is definitely the worst choice you have. You will need nearly 50 floppies for the minimum installation, and about 250 for the complete installation. The chance of one of them being bad is high. Most problems on a floppy install can be traced to bad media, or differences in alignment between the media and the drive in which they are used, so:

Before starting, format all floppies in the drive you intend to use, even if they are preformatted.

The first two floppies you'll need are the Kernel floppy and the MFS Root floppy, which were described earlier.

In addition, you need at minimum as many floppies as it takes to hold all files in the base directory, which contains the binary distribution. Read the file LAYOUT.TXT paying special attention to the "Distribution format" section, which describes which files you need.

If you're creating the floppies on a FreeBSD machine, you can put ufs file systems on the floppies instead:

# fdformat -f 1440 fd0.1440
# bsdlabel -w fd0.1440 floppy3
# newfs -t 2 -u 18 -l 1 -i 65536 /dev/fd0

Next, copy the files to the floppies. The distribution files are split into chunks that will fit exactly on a conventional 1.44MB floppy. Copy one file to each floppy. Make very sure to put the file base.inf on the first floppy; it is needed to find out how many floppies to read.

The installation itself is straightforward enough: follow the instructions starting on page 63, select Floppy in the installation medium menu on page 76, then follow the prompts.