BOOT(8)

NAME
boot - system bootstrapping procedures

DESCRIPTION
Power fail and crash recovery. Normally, the system will reboot itself at power-up or after crashes. An automatic consistency check of the file systems will be performed, and unless this fails, the system will resume multi-user operations.

Cold starts. On an HP300, the boot procedure uses the boot ROM to load a boot program from an LIF format directory at the beginning of an attached disk. The /usr/mdec directory contains a disk boot programs which should be placed in a new pack automatically by newfs(8) when the ``a'' partition file system on the pack is created.

This boot program finds the corresponding file on the given device (netbsd by default), loads that file into memory, and starts the program at the entry address specified in the program header.

The boot program can be interrupted by typing `^C' (ctrl-C). This will force the boot program to interactively prompt for a system to boot. If not interrupted, it will boot from the device from which the boot program itself was loaded.

The file specifications used for an interactive boot are of the form:

    device(unit, minor)

where device is the type of the device to be searched, unit is 8 * the hpib number plus the unit number of the disk or tape, and minor is the disk partition or tape file number. Normal line editing characters can be used when typing the file specification. Currently, ``rd'' and ``sd'' are the only valid device specifiers.

For example, to boot from the `a' file system of unit 0 on HP-IB 2, type ‘rd(16, 0)netbsd’ to the boot prompt. For tapes, the minor device number gives a file offset.

In an emergency, the bootstrap methods described in the paper can be used to boot from a distribution tape.

FILES
/netbsd
    system code
/usr/mdec/bootrd
    LIF format boot block
/usr/mdec/installboot
    program to install boot blocks

SEE ALSO
halt(8), reboot(8), shutdown(8)