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

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Booting Systems
Chapter 5468
Step 5. Load and initiate the HP-UX operating system:
hpux.efi then opens, and loads the HP-UX kernel into memory and
initiates it.
Step 6. HP-UX goes through its initialization process and begins normal
operation.
Automatic Versus Manual Booting
Whether your system boots automatically (providing for the option of
unattended booting in the case of a power failure or other unexpected
boot situations) or requires manual intervention is determined by
several things, most notably:
• the setting of the autoboot flag in non-volatile memory
• whether an AUTO file is present in the EFI partition on the selected
boot device
• whether you intend to boot from your system’s primary boot device
• whether your primary boot device (or the High-Availability Alternate
boot device) is available
Usually, the primary boot path points to the device from which you most
frequently boot and that device is available. If the autoboot flag is
enabled, your system will automatically boot from the selected boot
device (following a preset time-out).
autoboot on If the autoboot flag is set to on, hpux.efi will attempt
to boot using the items in the boot options list, in the
order specified. It reads the \EFI\HPUX\AUTO file from
the EFI file system on the first available device
containing an AUTO file. hpux.efi uses the contents of
AUTO to locate the kernel file to load and determine
which boot options (if any) to use. It then loads and
initiates the kernel.
If no AUTO file is located the boot process stops at the
hpux.efi loader (you will see the HPUX> prompt) and
you can manually boot HP-UX or perform other tasks.