ForthOS operates more or less directly upon your disk device, and thus it can wipe away any or all of your disk contents. Make a backup before you get started, and back up as often as needed based on knowing that ForthOS provides primitives which can destroy your disk contents without warning.

You probably want to give ForthOS a quick boot on your computer, just to ensure hardware compatibility before spending time on a disk-based installation. Your PC needs a CD drive which supports booting; please get the compressed CD image, decompress it (use gzip), and burn a CD. Load it in your CD drive, make sure your BIOS is configured to try booting from CD, and try and boot it up. If you get a boot menu, and hit return, you should be booted directly into ForthOS. You may want to take a look at the test drive document, although you should stay away from disk accesses until your disk is set up.

ForthOS is bootloaded by the GRUB boot loader, so getting GRUB set up is your first step. When you booted directly from the CD, GRUB was loaded from there, and you didn't need to hassle with it otherwise. Please visit the GRUB home page, as you might want to consider making GRUB your disk bootstrap mechanism. Note that if you have the bootable ForthOS CD, you can always boot this, and then use GRUB from CD to boot ForthOS.

The next step is to install ForthOS --everything you need is on that CD image.