handbook-InstallDiskSetup

Set up Disk for Installation

Note the warning to backup important data. Things can always go wrong and if, for example, you have another partition with important files, a mistype or other error might lose all the information on that partition. Assuming this is done, or that you aren't worried about other data on the machine, again, select install DragonFly BSD and you will be taken to the next screen:

If you have multiple disks installed, chose one where you want to install DragonFly. We chose ad0 here.

After selecting the disk we need to decide how much of the disk we want to use. We choose to use the entire disk and see the next screen. Now we can chose between the two file systems on DragonFly. HAMMER is the brand-new file system with a big number of features like snapshots, history tracking, mirroring etc. UFS is the old BSD file system.

We select HAMMER and see now the following screen:

The screen (shown above) gives the default partition scheme for this drive. As the screen says, the * indicates that it will use remainder of the disk. If you chose HAMMER as your file system there is no need to change the default settings. One swap partition is created and the remaining space is assigned to the root partition. The installer will automatically add sub-partitions (called Pseudo File Systems (PFS) in HAMMER) for /home, /usr, /var, /var/crash, /var/tmp and /tmp for you. If you want to get more information about HAMMER, have a look in the man page.