Armed with your OpenBSD software and a computer with supported hardware, you are now ready to start an actual installation. This chapter takes you through a full installation on amd64 and i386 systems via CD and FTP, booting from a CD or floppy disk.

In this chapter, I assume that you’re dedicating your computer to OpenBSD. You can install multiple operating systems on a single computer, of course, but that’s a less common use case. If you want to install multiple operating systems on your computer, follow the instructions in the OpenBSD FAQ. (When installing multiple operating systems on a single computer, it’s easy to accidentally damage one of those operating systems, so proceed with caution.)

Before you begin OpenBSD installation, make sure the data on your machine is backed up! When you dedicate your machine to OpenBSD, you’ll overwrite the entire hard drive.