HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90023, September 2010)

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
device that you are booting from. 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.
autoboot off If the autoboot flag is set to off the boot process stops at the EFI
Boot Manager from which you can manually boot HP-UX or
perform other tasks.
Overriding an Automatic Boot
If the autoboot flag in the nonvolatile memory of your system or nPartition is enabled,
your system or nPartition will attempt to automatically boot following a boot delay.
By default, the boot delay is set to 10 seconds however you can change this.
To override an automatic boot, press the space bar before the autoboot delay period
expires. Instead of continuing with the autoboot, your system or nPartition will allow
you to interact with the EFI Boot Manager.
NOTE: Almost any key will perform the same action as the space bar, however the
ENTER key will start the boot sequence immediately, and other keys might be
meaningful to the boot manager (for example, pressing v will move the currently
selected boot manager menu option down one item).
You can override an automatic boot to manually interact with the EFI Boot Manager
to:
Booting Systems 39