Installing and Managing HP-UX Virtual Partitions (includes A.04.02)

Monitor and Shell Commands
EFI Boot Disk Paths, including Disk Mirrors, and vparefiutil (Integrity only)
Chapter 5
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EFI Boot Disk Paths, including Disk Mirrors, and vparefiutil
(Integrity only)
On PA-RISC systems, the bootloader can boot a disk using only the hardware path of the disk. However, on
Integrity systems, the bootloader requires the EFI path. On Integrity systems running vPars, the vPars
database contains the initial hardware path to EFI path mappings; on boot of a virtual partition, the vPars
Monitor transparently provides the EFI path from the vPars database to the bootloader so that a virtual
partition can boot.
The EFI path changes whenever the boot area changes on the disk. During the initial creation of the vPars
database, during the installation of an OS using vparboot -I, and during the execution of the setboot
command, the EFI paths are updated in the vPars database.
However, beyond the above situations, whenever the EFI path of an existing boot disk changes or an
additional boot disk is added, including adding a boot disk mirror, the EFI mappings within the vPars
database need to be updated. Otherwise, the virtual partition may not boot. Note that using vparmodify to
change a boot path in the vPars database does not update the EFI path in the vPars database.
To update the EFI path of a boot disk in the vPars database (for example, after creating a boot disk mirror),
execute vparefiutil -u (-u for update) on each virtual partition. Other examples of when you should use
vparefiutil include:
• For a specific HP-UX hardware path, if there is no EFI path mapping, the vparboot and vparload
commands will fail with the following error message:
Primary boot path not found.
Internal error in setting up vPars variables.
"vpar" load failed.
• For a specific HP-UX hardware path, if the EFI path mapping is stale or not up to date, then booting from
the disk will fail with an error message similar to the following:
Start of HP-UX HA Alternate Boot: 1/0/0/2/0.6.0 failed:
Not Found
vparefiutil without any options can be used to display the current hardware to EFI path mappings.
For more information on vparefiutil and all the possible options, see the manpage vparefiutil (1M).
NOTE Following are some scenarios where you may need to perform additional actions if the EFI path
to hardware path mappings are not up to date in the vPars database:
• Creating an alternate vPars database while in vPars mode.
Problem:
If an alternate vPars database is created while in vPars mode and the Monitor is later
booted using that alternate database, then it may not be possible to boot some of the virtual
partitions of the alternate database if the EFI paths corresponding to those hardware paths
are not present in the alternate database.
Solutions:
• The virtual partitions that could not boot can be re-installed using vparboot -I:
vparboot -p
partition_name -I