Easy OpenBSD Partition Scheme

I often see many posts that talk about OpenBSD and the one complaint that comes up more than anything is the supposed difficulty of the OpenBSD partition manager. I will show you the easy partition scheme that uses one large partition, similar to many Linux distributions.

You will see the screen below after running the OpenBSD installer and it will ask you to choose your disk.

OpenBSD Disk Chooser

Choose your disk and select 'C' for custom configuration and select 'p' to print the table. You see partition 'c' which references the whole disk in BSD partitions.

Next, you will create your easy partitions. First, let's create the swap at the beginning of the disk, meaning we will create 'b' first. Creating partitions in layout order makes the tool much simpler.

Add Swap And Partition a as two partitions.

So you see above, I added 'b', letting it use the default offset [64], setting the size to 250 megabytes. I pressed enter to take the default FS type of [swap] for 'b'. Then we add the root partition which must be labelled 'a' for the kernel to start the operating system. Next, let the partition manager select the next available offset and it picks the end of the disk automatically.

You could have added other partitions by setting the root partition to 128M, and possibly added a /usr at partition 'f' using the remainder of the disk. You can choose your layout to be more advanced, but I meet many people who just want one big partition using the whole disk. You may now select your install packages, or sets as named in OpenBSD, and finish your install.