flashrd installation

It's pretty simple. Just do a make build, or unpack the openbsd base46.tgz, etc46.tgz, and man46.tgz (minimum recommended) into a directory. (Feel free to omit any sets that aren't necessary, but base46.tgz and etc46.tgz are the minimum required.)

  1. mkdir /tmp/openbsd
  2. cd /tmp/openbsd
  3. tar xzpf ~/base46.tgz
  4. tar xzpf ~/etc46.tgz
  5. tar xzpf ~/man46.tgz
  6. tar xzpf ~/misc46.tgz
  7. tar xzpf ~/comp46.tgz
  8. tar xzpf ~/game46.tgz

Make sure you have a source tree for the same kernel version at /usr/src/sys. If you don't, get a new one.

  1. cd /usr
  2. cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.openbsd.org:/cvs -q get -rOPENBSD_4_6 src/sys

Then run flashrd against it.

  1. cd ~
  2. tar xzf flashrd-20090727.tar.gz
  3. cd flashrd-20090727
  4. ./flashrd /tmp/openbsd

You'll end up with a disk image that you can write to flash. Follow the image installation instructions for further guidance.


flashrd can also write directly to a disk. Whatever geometry the device shows up as will be used for the disklabel this way. Growimg gives you control over geometry, but that shouldn't really matter these days.

  1. cd ~
  2. tar xzf flashrd-20090727.tar.gz
  3. cd flashrd-20090727
  4. ./flashrd -disk sd2 /tmp/openbsd
  5. ./cfgflashrd -disk sd2 -rdroot szez-ARCH.DATE