Below you will find instructions on how to boot and install MorphOS 3.1. In order to download the time-limited demo version, please go to this page. If you would like to learn more about what hardware is compatible with MorphOS 3.1, please visit our hardware compatibility section.
If you experience any trouble with MorphOS 3.1, please visit our help desk section.

MorphOS Boot CD

Graphic cards support:

  • Radeon7000 (VE) / 7200 / 7500 / 8500 (LE) / 9000 (PRO )/ 9100 / 9200(SE) / 9250, 9600 Pro / XT *, 9700 Pro *, 9800 *, Rage 128 Pro * - a card with at least 128MB is recommended
  • Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5
  • SiS6326 *, SiS300 *, SiS305 *, SiS315 *
  • Permedia2 * / Permedia2v *
  • XGI Volari V3XT *, V5 *, V5XT *, V8[Ultra] *

* = 3D hardware acceleration is not supported on these cards


Booting

eMac:

  • Turn on your eMac. (Please note that only 1.25 Ghz and 1.42 Ghz models are supported.)
  • Press the Media Eject key ( ) on the keyboard to open the drive tray.
  • If your eMac doesn't boot MorphOS or it has already booted another operating system, reboot and press and hold the 'C' key immediately after the welcome chime. Alternatively you can press and hold the Alt key to get the eMac's boot menu.
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen instructions.

Mac mini:

  • Turn on the Mac mini.
  • In order to eject a previously inserted disc from your optical drive, press and hold your left mouse button during the reboot or power on process.
  • Insert the MorphOS CD immediately while holding the 'C' key.
  • If the mini doesn't boot MorphOS or it has already booted another operating system, reboot and press and hold the 'C' key immediately after the welcome chime. Alternatively you can press and hold the Alt key to get to the mini's boot menu.
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen
    instructions.

PowerBook

  • Turn on the PowerBook.
  • In order to eject a previously inserted disc from your optical drive, press and hold your left mouse button during the reboot or power on process.
  • Insert the MorphOS CD immediately while holding the 'C' key.
  • If the notebook does not boot MorphOS or it has already booted another operating system, reboot and press and hold the 'C' key immediately after the welcome chime. Alternatively you can press and hold the Alt key to get to the Powerbook's boot menu.
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen
    instructions.

PowerMac:

  • Turn on your Power Mac. (Please note that only G4 models are supported. NVidia graphics cards will not work.)
  • Press the Media Eject key ( ) on the keyboard to open the drive tray.
  • If your Power Mac doesn't boot MorphOS or it has already booted another operating system, reboot and press and hold the 'C' key immediately after the welcome chime. Alternatively you can press and hold the Alt key to get to the Power Mac's boot menu.
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen instructions.

Pegasos 1/2:

  • Turn on your Pegasos 1/2 :)
  • Press escape on the keyboard until you reach the Open Firmware prompt
  • Insert the CD
  • At the Open Firmware prompt, type:
    (Pegasos 2) > boot cd boot.img
    (Pegasos 1) > boot /ide/cd bootpeg1.img
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen instructions.

Note: if your firmware doesn't recognize your cdrom (use show-devs to find out), try to use another cdrom drive.

Efika:

  • Download morphos-3.1-efikainstall.img and put it in the root directory of a USB mass storage device.
  • Insert the USB device into a USB port on the Efika.
  • In order to have access to a mouse and keyboard while you are installing from a USB device, we suggest you use a USB hub to connect these input devices.
  • Turn on your Efika.
  • Press escape on the keyboard until you reach the Open Firmware prompt.
  • At the Open Firmware prompt, type:
    > boot scsi:0 morphos-3.1-efikainstall.img
  • MorphOS will now start booting. Please be patient. This may take a short while. Once it is done booting, click on the iWizard icon and start the download of the full MorphOS ISO..
  • Please note that the default ISO download directory is ram: - however the ISO will not fit there. Therefore, you must manually adjust the download path to match the partition you are installing MorphOS to.

 

Installation

Run the install application IWizard either from the Bienvenue window or the 'Tools' directory on the Install CD. IWizard will guide you through basic configuration, partitioning, formatting and installation. You need to have at least 1 bootable partition in order to boot MorphOS from the hard drive.

If you are attempting to install MorphOS on a Mac mini, eMac or Power Mac, please note that IWizard will format the drive automatically, destroying the previous contents of the hard drive. Instructions on how to install and configure MorphOS to run alongside other operating systems can be found here but are not officially endorsed nor supported by the MorphOS Development Team.

In case you are using a Pegasos 1 machine, you should install MorphOS on the first partition and make sure it's formatted with FFS. Otherwise you will have to move the boot.img file to an FFS partition below the 1st 4GB on the hd.

On any systems based on Pegasos 1, Pegasos 2, and Efika mainboards, the boot image must reside on a partition with a 512 byte block size since the firmware in these machines can not read partitions with a different block size.

On a Mac mini, eMac and Power Mac, on the other hand, the boot image must reside on a HFS (not HFS+ !) partition called Boot. This is done automatically by the IWizard application.


Upgrade

It is generally best to install MorphOS 3.1 on a clean partition rather than update from 1.4.5. Unless you choose the "update" feature of the install program, the installer will overwrite files except for the MorphOS directory which will be renamed to MorphOS-old prior to the installation. Your :Prefs/env-archive will be copied to :Prefs/env-archive-old as IWizard copies some of the settings to the installed system.

If you do decide to use the "update" feature to keep your old settings and icons, please take special note that upgrading from versions of MorphOS older than 2.0 is an unsupported operation; back up your system partition before attempting it and install MorphOS 3.1 from scratch in case of any problems.


New boot options

BD=BootDevice/K - Boot from given device. Example:
> boot .. bootdevice=SDH2

The boot menu does not allow changes to the mount parameters for technical reasons, so you need to use this parameter instead.

BM=BootMenu/S - Enter bootmenu without user intervention.

SML=SafeMemLists/S - Use old MorphOS 1.x-style memory system with extra safety checks. This could be useful for debugging
some buggy applications for example. SML is much slower than the new MorphOS 2 memory system however.

PC=PreloadCmd/K - Command(s) to execute before startup-sequence. Multiple
commands can be given separated by a *N. Examples:
> boot ... PC="echo *"Hello, world*""
> boot ... PC="dir sys:*Nquit"