Technical data

Booting and Resetting nPartitions
Configuring Boot Paths and Boot Actions
HP System Partitions Guide: Administration for nPartitions, rev 5.1 229
• 0—Go to BCH.
• 1—Boot this path, if fail go to BCH.
• 2—Boot this path, if fail attempt to perform the next path’s boot
action.
• 3—Skip this path, attempt to perform the next path’s boot action.
By default, all path flags are set to 0 (“Go to BCH”).
The boot actions are performed automatically by the BCH interface when
an nPartition boots to BCH, as possible and necessary. However, boot
action settings do not affect the behavior of the BCH BOOT command.
Setting Autoboot through Boot Paths and Boot Actions
Each nPartition’s Autoboot setting is established by the boot action
(path flag) settings for the nPartition’s boot paths.
For an nPartition to automatically boot HP-UX, it must be configured in
the following way:
• The nPartition must have at least one bootable HP-UX device that is
pointed to by the PRI, HAA, or ALT boot path variable.
• The path flag (boot action) setting for a bootable device’s path
variable must be set to “boot this path” (1 or 2).
• When the nPartition boots it must proceed to execute a bootable
device’s boot action that specifies to “boot this path”, and it must find
the device.
For example, an nPartition could automatically boot HP-UX with the
following configuration: both the PRI and HAA paths point to bootable
devices, and the PRI action is 2 (“boot this path, if fail attempt to perform
the next path’s boot action”) and the HAA action is 1 (“boot this path, if
fail go to BCH”).
In this example configuration, the nPartition could automatically boot
HP-UX even if the PRI path were not available. When the nPartition
boots to BCH it first attempts to boot the PRI device. If the PRI device
cannot be booted, because the PRI path flag specifies to “if fail attempt to
perform the next path’s boot action”, it then refers to the HAA path and
action. Because in this example the HAA path points to a bootable
device, and because the HAA path flag specifies to attempt to boot the
HAA device, the nPartition can still automatically boot HP-UX (if the
HAA device is available).