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 as described in fsck(8), and unless this fails, the system will resume multi-user operations.

Cold starts

A disk-boot program (/usr/mdec/ufsboot) will attempt to load netbsd from partition A of the boot device, which must currently be an ``sd'' disk. Alternatively, network boot program (/usr/mdec/netboot) will load netbsd from the NFS root as determined by the procedure described in diskless(8).

Boot program options

-a
Prompt for the root file system device, the system crash dump device, and the path to init(8).

-d
Bring the system up in debug mode. Here it waits for a kernel debugger connect; see ddb(4).

-q
Boot the system in quiet mode.

-s
Bring the system up in single-user mode.

-v
Boot the system in verbose mode.

Any extra flags or arguments, or the <boot string> after the -- separator are passed to the boot PROM. Other flags are currently ignored.

At any time you can break back to the ROM by pressing the `L1' and `a' keys at the same time (if the console is a serial port the same is achieved by sending a `break'). If you do this accidentally you can continue whatever was in progress by typing `c' followed by the return key.

FILES

/netbsd
system code
/usr/mdec/bootxx
first-level boot block for disks
/usr/mdec/netboot
boot program for NFS (diskless) boot
/usr/mdec/ufsboot
second-level boot program for UFS disks
/usr/mdec/installboot
program to install bootxx on a disk

SEE ALSO

disklabel(8), fsck(8), halt(8), init(8), rc(8), shutdown(8), syslogd(8)