Installing AROS on Hard Drive

Installing AROS on your hard drive

*HEALTH WARNING* - Installing
AROS onto your hard drive is extremely hazardous to your data. It is
practically a guarantee that something will futz up and render your
partitions unreadable.

Bearing the above in mind, I'll show you how to install AROS to a
single partition. I wont even try to get you going with multiple OSs on
multiple partitions. It can apparently be done - but the chances of
futzing up are phenomenal. The above installation has been tested with
ArosMax 045, which came out in about late October 2005.

Partition your hard drives crudely

AROS has problems with partitions over 4GB in size. You will therefore
almost certainly need to repartition your hard drive to deal with this
limit. Your best bet is to use RPM (Ranish Partition Manager), which
you can get from here .
Alternatively, you can use UltimateBootCd
. I used version 32 from around February 2005, and I'll explain to you
how to perform partitioning using it.

1. Download UBC (Ultimate Boot CD), cut an ISO of it, and boot your
   computer with the CD in the drive.
2. From the main menu, select F3 File System Tools. Then select F1
   Ranish Partition Manager.
3. Reset the Master Boot Record to be the Standard IPL
4. Delete all the partitions that you have
5. Repartition the hard drive so that you have partitions of less
   than 4GB each. Don't worry about the file system type; just use anyone
   that's available. FAT-16 will do. Quick formats will also be OK.
6. Toggle the first partition (which will be labelled # 2) to be
   bootable
7. Click F2 to Save the changes.
8. Remove UCB

Partition your hard drives to AROS format

1. Insert the latest version of the Arosmin CD, and reboot your
   computer.
2. When it boots, double-click the CD icon near the top left hand
   corner of the screen.  On my version, it looks like a yellow CD with
   the words ArosMax044 underneath. Double-clicking causes a window to
   pop up labelled ArosMax044:
3. Double-click the Tools folder. This causes another window to pop
   up.
4. Double-click the HDToolbox icon. It might appear on your system
   as HDTool.. . This causes the HDToolBox application to start.

5. Double-click the entry marked ata.device. The left pane will be
   replaced with the name of the drive (in my case QUANTUM FIREBALL), and
   the right pane will show Units: 1.
6. Highlight the name of the drive. This causes the right-hand pane
   to read something like:

Size 9.5G

Partition Table: PC-MBR

Partitions: 1

7. Double-click the name of your drive. The left pane now reads
   Partition 0, and the right pane remains unchanged.
8. Single-click Partition 0. This changes the state of a number of
   the buttons, and causes the right pane to read something like:

Size 3.3G

Partition Table: Unknown

Partition Type: FAT16

Active: Yes

Bootable: No

Automount: No

9. Click the button Create Table. This causes a dialog box called
   Partition Table Type to appear.
10. Select entry RDB.
11. Click OK. This causes the dialog box to disappear, and changes
    the entry Partition Table in the right pane to read RDB.
12. Click button Change Type. This causes a dialog box called
    Partition Type to appear.

13. Select item AROS RDB Partition Table.
14. Click OK. This causes the dialog box to disappear, and changes
    the entry Partition Type in the right pane to read AROS RDB Partition
    Table.
15. Double-click the entry Partition 0 in the left pane. This causes
    the text Partition 0 to disappear, and changes some of the button
    states.
16. Click the button Add Entry. This causes a dialog box called
    Select empty area to appear.
17. Single-click on the large chequered rectangle in the dialog box.
    This causes the chequered rectangle to have a blue hue.
18. Click button OK. This causes the dialog box to disappear. The
    left pane should now have the entry DH0.
19. Highlight the entry DH0.
20. Click button Switches. This causes a dialog box called Switches
    to appear.
21. Check the entries Automount and Bootable, so that ticks appear
    besides them.
22. Click the OK button. This causes the Switches dialog box to
    disappear, and marks the entries in the right pane called Bootable and
    Automount to Yes.
23. Click the button Change Type. This causes a dialog box labelled
    Partition Type to appear.
24. Highlight entry Fast Filesystem Intl.
25. Click OK. This causes the dialog box to disappear.
26. In the left pane, double-click the first entry in the list - it
    is ".." . This causes the left pane to read Partition 0, and the
    information in the right pane to disappear.
27. In the left pane, double-click the first entry in the list - it
    is ".." . This causes the left pane to read QUANTUM FIREBALL (or
    whatever your drive name is called).
28. In the left pane, double-click the first entry in the list - it
    is ".." . This takes you back to the first layout, containing the entry
    ata.device. There is a * by the side of it, indicating that there is
    information which needs to be saved.
29. Highlight the entry ata.device.
30. Click the button Save Changes. This causes a dialog box labelled
    HDToolBox to appear.
31. Click button All. This writes the changes that you made to the
    hard disk. Scary!

Warm reboot  and confirmation

The hdtoolbox has a tendency to be temperamental, with not all the
changes becoming effective. To ensure that everything is OK:

1. Hit keys Ctrl, L-AMIGA (actually the left Windows key) and
   R-AMIGA (actually the right Windows key). This causes a warm reboot of
   the Amiga.
2. Hit key R-AMIGA w. This causes an AROS shell to appear.
3. In the shell, type the word assign . A bunch of output should
   appear. Look in the section Devices: at the bottom. You should see DH0
   listed. If not (and don't panic if not), it means that something in the
   section above hasn't taken effect. So you should restart hdtoolbox, and
   make inspections of the above steps. Chances are that there is
   something wrong with the DH0 entry.

If it looks OK, then you should check the entries again using
hdtoolbox. I've listed the hierarchies of entries, and what should
appear in the left and right panes when the item in the left pane is
highlighted - your entries will of course be slightly different.

scsi.device

ata.device <-- highlighted

fdisk.device

Units: 1

..

QUANTUM FIREBALL <--- yours will be different

Size: 9.5G

Partition Table: PC-MBR

Partitions: 1

..

Partition 0

Size: 3.3G

Partition Table: RDB

Partitions: 1

Partition Type: AROS RDB Partition Table

Active: Yes

Bootable: No

Automount: No

..

DH0

Size: 3.3G

Partition Table: Unknown

Partition Type: Fast Filesystem Intl

Active: No

Bootable: Yes

Automount: Yes

Copy over files and install Grub

Having partitioned your hard drive, you should now be ready to install.

1. If necessary, press keys R-AMIGA w to open an AROS shell.
2. Type format64 drive dh0:
   name AROS FFS QUICK to format the drive.

3. Where it says Insert the
   disk ... , just press RETURN to continue
4. Type s:arosmax/Install .
   This will change the directory to where the installation tools are.
5. Type dir to give
   you an idea of what scripts are available.
6. Type execute copyfiles.script to install . It takes me just over 5
   minutes to copy the files over.

7. Type execute
   InstallGrub.script which, as you can probably guess, installs
   Grub, the boot manager. The script may display a warning about system
   partitions over 4GB. Click OK - hopefully you wont experience any
   problems.

You're almost finished! Remove the CD, reboot the system either softly
(Ctrl, L-AMIGA, R-AMIGA) or hardly (hard reset or recycling the power
switch), and away you go. Enjoy!

See also

File Systems

Links

Amiga Disk File
Format FAQ - not terribly interesting, perhaps

AROS Grub
and MSDOS Multiboot - for those who want to try multiple partitions
and multiple OSs

Installing
AROS - Aros-Exec thread 690

Author: Mark Carter