HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

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 in the HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide: Logical Volume
Management volume.
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 boot
file system, later to be mounted on the root file system under /stand, so that the
booted kernel can be found as the file /stand/vmunix.
5. Load and initiate the HP-UX operating system: hpux.efi then opens, and loads
the HP-UX kernel into memory and initiates it.
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
40 Booting and Shutdown