HP-UX HB v13.00 Ch-04 - System Recovery

HP-UX Handbook – Rev 13.00 Page 4 (of 54)
Chapter 04 System Recovery
October 29, 2013
This chapter deals with several kinds of HP-UX boot problems and offers different approaches
how to get the system up and running again. First of all it is always useful to know the general
sequence of events that occure when an HP 9000 system boots up the HP-UX operating system.
ATTENTION: The boot process is different on Itanium system. Refer to the Itanium chapter.
How an HP-UX System boots
1. The firmware determines from which device to boot via either user input or primary boot
path.
2. The firmware looks for a LIF header on that device, and if it finds it, it looks in the LIF
header for where the ISL starts. A typical LIF header residing at the start of a LVM boot
disk looks like this:
# lifls -l /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0
volume ISL10 data size 7984 directory size 8
filename type start size implement created
===============================================================
ISL -12800 584 306 0 00/11/08 20:49:59
HPUX -12928 896 848 0 00/11/08 20:50:00
LABEL BIN 1744 8 0 01/05/31 06:54:08
AUTO -12289 1752 1 0 01/05/31 06:54:10
The values represent 256 Byte units, so the ISL starts e.g. at offset 146 K. All LVM boot
disks (created with pvcreate –B) reserve space between their PVRA and VGRA to hold
a BDRA and the LIF files. Their LVM header size is always 2912K. In addition to the
files above there may be additional files, e.g. for the Offline diagnostics. A PAD file may
be used to fill (pad) unneeded space with zeros.
3. The firmware loads the ISL into memory from the boot device and executes it. It passes a
flag to it that indicates whether to run interactively or to autoboot.
4. If the ISL is interactive then it gives the ISL> prompt and waits for user input before
proceeding.
5. If the ISL is not interactive, then it looks for the AUTO file on the boot device to
determine what to run next. Since the AUTO file is also listed in the LIF header we can
have look at it using lifcp(1):
# lifcp /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0:AUTO –
hpux
6. The AUTO file or user input usually supplies the hpux command’s arguments. This tells
ISL to load the program HPUX from the LIF header on the boot device and to run it with
the given arguments.