Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Booting Systems
Chapter 5 467
HAA The High-Availability Alternate boot path is the path
you want your system to boot from should your primary
boot path fail.
ALT The ALTernate boot path is the hardware path to an
alternate boot source (for example, a tape drive,
network-based boot source, or optical disc drive).
On HP Integrity Servers, the PRI boot path is tried during an automatic
boot. You can manually override an automatic boot by interrupting the
boot process before the AUTOBOOT DELAY expires. If an autoboot from the
primary boot path (first item in the Boot Options List) is not possible,
you will need to manually select a boot path from the EFI Boot Manager
menu.
Boot disks on HP Integrity servers contain a special partition called an
EFI partition. The EFI partition, a derivative of the FAT file system
commonly found on PCs, contains EFI applications that can be run
before HP-UX is initiated. One such application, the EFI boot manager,
is automatically launched and in turn launches the HP-UX boot loader,
hpux.efi (also an EFI application).
NOTE A diagram and brief description of the disk layout for disks containing
EFI partitions is available at “Mirroring a Boot Disk with LVM on
HP-UX 11i for HP Integrity Servers” on page 634.
Step 4. Kernel file selection:
Once a boot device is selected, the HP-UX-specific boot loader hpux.efi
is initiated. hpux.efi uses the contents of the AUTO file on the selected
boot device to locate the kernel file to boot.
Typically, the AUTO file contains:
boot vmunix
which tells hpux.efi to load the kernel from the file called vmunix from
the default file system (/stand) -- the file /stand/vmunix.