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Old 18th October 2013
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sparky View Post
Also I'm not sure if the USB installer is using a 32bit or 64bit kernel as there is no definitive reference anywhere, however, it seems to hint at 32bit by stating i386 so I don't know if that's the issue...?
The machine types i386 and amd64 denote the 32-bit and 64-bit Intel/AMD architectures, respectively.
Quote:
Maybe by using Live-usb I've made my life more complicated then it has to be however, since I couldn't find a USB installer image of OpenBSD 5.3 x64 I thought this was my best bet - I'm not a fan of CD installs though might have to go that way if necessary.

Would anyone be able to give me any advice?
If an optical drive or diskette drive (...shudder...) are not at hand, installs on bare-metal i386/amd64 platforms are normally conducted in one of these two ways:
  • network boot with PXE
  • boot from USB
PXE booting is described in pxeboot(8) and in brief: you just need one or two servers that provides DHCP and TFTP on the local network. The server(s) need not be the same architecture or OS, and the TFTP server needs only serve two files: the pxeboot bootloader for OpenBSD and the OpenBSD bsd.rd kernel.

Booting from USB requires an existing OpenBSD system, in order to create a bootable USB drive -- whether a real drive or a stick, if the i386/amd64 BIOS can boot from USB, that's all that's needed. The bootable drive can be created with fdisk(8), disklabel(8), newfs(8), and installboot(8), and have a copy of the bsd.rd kernel on it. It need not be a complete OpenBSD system.
Quote:
Maybe it's using 32bit after all and is incompatible with the systemboard....
I don't think so. All 64-bit Intel/AMD CPUs I'm aware of are able to execute the 32-bit instruction set.

Edited to add:

The installboot program requires the admin to have previously copied the second stage bootloader (boot) to the drive. It installs and then configures the first stage bootloader (biosboot) in the Partition Boot Record (PBR). Both of these files are stored in /usr/mdec with the installboot program.

Last edited by jggimi; 18th October 2013 at 11:25 AM.
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