Getting ready

First, set up your HD - either real or a virtual drive image - for use. For a real drive, this may involve plugging it into the machine (always a good start) and setting it up in the BIOS. For a virtualiser's or emulator's virtual drive, you probably just need to select an option to create a new drive image, and set it as one of the virtual PC's boot devices (the CD drive must be the first boot device during installation of AROS however).

The following options are depending on what you want to do.

Installing AROS Only

The most simple situation is that of installing AROS alone on the whole disk, either a new one or one with some unneeded data on it. You might also use an additional HDD for AROS.

Currently the installation is meant to be made by means of the InstallAROS program, which is located in the Tools drawer on your BootCD. Please, launch it by clicking on its icon. Once it's launched, it'll show you the greeting screen.

Then click the Proceed button in the installer to get a screen with installing options.

You can see the current installing device (ahci.device) and its unit (0), which is your first HDD. If you intend to install on additional disk, please, change this number. To find out the number, you can use Tools/HDToolbox utility. Check the option Only use free space if you want to keep current partitions as they are, or select Wipe disk to erase existing data on the hard drive. You can set the size of new AROS partition if you wish, and add an extra WORK partition to install programs on it. After you click the Proceed button again, InstallAROS will create the partition or partitions, and after that it will ask you to reboot.

After the reboot, please start InstallAROS again.

This time, the option Use existing AROS partitions should be selected. Proceed with this. You will see some extra options in a window.

• Choose language Options allows you to select the locale of your newly

  installed system (by launching the Prefs/Locale program).

• Install AROS Core System allows installing of all AROS base programs

  that the OS needs to function properly.

• Install Extra Software allows installing additional programs (located

  in the Extras drawer and, if selected, on the WORK partition).

• Install Development Software allows the installation of development

  software, like programming languages.

• Install Bootloader enables installing of GRUB bootloader to the MBR of

  HD. (There can be some situations where you don't need to install this.)

Make your choice and click the Proceed button.

On the next installer screen you can choose which partitions you want to format and copy files to, and whether a WORK partition is used and whether files should be copied to it.

After you made your choices and proceed, the installer will show the GRUB installation device and the path to the GRUB files for you to check.

Proceeding, you will see the last screen before installation, which will warn you that formatting isn't reversible.

After clicking Proceed one last time, you should see the installer doing its work. You may be asked to select your keyboard type and locale settings, then the files are being copied. This may take a while; be patient, please.

After the installation is finished, you can remove the AROS Live CD from the CD-ROM drive and reboot into your newly-installed AROS system.

Installing AROS along with Windows(R)/DOS(R)

Installing AROS along with Windows should be an easy task (assuming you use Windows XP). Generally, you'll just need to follow the installer prompts as shown above to make this working. The installer is designed to automatically detect your Windows installation and put it in the GRUB menu. Check the chapter above about standalone AROS installation for the details of the procedure.

If you ever need to restore the previous NT loader, you can use the fixmbr command in the recovery console from your Windows installation CD.

There can be problems with some older and newer Windows versions (like 95/98 and Vista). For installing over Vista you can use steps, similar to the ones for Linux with GRUB installer. In cases where Grub should be installed and used to boot Vista, you'd just need to add a menu entry to your /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

If you prefer to use the Vista bootloader, there are programs like EasyBCD to manage its behavior.

TO-DO more...

Installing AROS along with Linux/BSD

Installing AROS along with Linux or BSD systems is almost the same as doing so for Windows. You'll need to create free space for AROS with available tools. Then use InstallAROS to do the partitioning and formatting of the AROS partition and copy the system on to it. (You can use additional WORK partition if you want to.) It's better, however, not to install the bootloader (uncheck the corresponding checkbox):

[ ] Install Bootloader

After the installer has finished copying the files, it will ask you to reboot. After the reboot you'll need to boot your Linux/BSD again, to set up the bootloader. AROS uses a patched GRUB bootloader, able to load a kernel from AFFS. But you don't have to use it, if you put AROS kernel in the location of your system kernel is - usually /boot - and use a conventional GRUB from your distribution. Just copy /boot/aros-i386.gz from AROS LiveCD to /boot. Then put some new lines to the end of your /boot/grub/menu.lst file to include an AROS menu entry:

title AROS VBE  640x480  16bpp
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/aros-pc-i386.gz vesa=640x480x16 ATA=32bit floppy=disabled
quiet
boot

You can change the kernel's parameters to set the screen resolution. The 'floppy=disabled' option disables the floppy trackdisk device, as this device is not too useful these days but can cause troubles in some cases.

If you happen to use lilo or any other booloader, this trick won't be that easy. (It's hard to make lilo booting AROS kernel.) You will need to somehow chainload AROS GRUB and set it to start up a kernel.

After the reboot, you should be able to see an AROS entry in the GRUB menu and to boot AROS.

Installing AROS along with other systems

A lot of other operating systems exist on the platforms AROS supports. If your system uses GRUB bootloader the process should be fairly similar to the one for Linux. If not, please remember that all you need for AROS to boot is just to place its files on a partition where GRUB can find it and boot the kernel.

TO-DO more...