March 23, 2006 BOOT 8 prep

### NAME

boot - system bootstrapping procedures

### SYNOPSIS

boot

### 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

The prep architecture does not allow the direct booting of a kernel from the hard drive. Instead it requires a complete boot image to be loaded. This boot image contains a NetBSD kernel, which will then provide access to the devices on the machine. The image can be placed on any device that the firmware considers a bootable device. Usually this is either a SCSI disk, tape, CD-ROM, or floppy drive.

#### Boot program options

The prep architecture and bootloader does not support any option parsing at the boot prompt.

#### Boot partition

The prep port requires a special boot partition on the primary boot device in order to load the kernel. This partition consists of a PC-style i386 partition label, a small bootloader, and a kernel image. The prep firmware looks for a partition of type 0x41 (65) and expects the bootloader, immediately followed by the kernel, to be there. The mkbootimage(8) command needs to be used to generate this image.

### FILES

```/netbsd`
  system code
```/usr/mdec/boot`
  system bootstrap
```/usr/mdec/boot_com0`
  system bootstrap with serial console

### SEE ALSO

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