BOOT(8)               NetBSD/prep System Manager's Manual              BOOT(8)

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)

NetBSD 5.0_STABLE               March 23, 2006               NetBSD 5.0_STABLE
