14 Creating Your Own Boot and Installation Media

This chapter explains how to create custom HP-UX boot and installation media.

Installation media can be a tape or DVD containing:

•A golden archive

•A recovery archive

•A software depot

•A golden or recovery archive, plus a software depot

NOTE: It is possible to create a bootable USB flash drive that works with Integrity systems. See the Ignite-UX USB Memory Stick Boot white paper, available at http://www.hp.com/go/ ignite-ux-docs.

All installation media are bootable. To create installation media, you need a basic knowledge of Ignite-UX functionality.

Why Use Custom Boot and Installation Media?

You might want to build boot or custom installation media if:

•You have to recover systems that cannot boot from a recovery tape or the network, so boot media is required for the two-step media recovery process.

•You have a large number of systems that are basically identical, and the networking does not allow easy or fast access to an Ignite-UX server, perhaps due to dispersed geography or for security reasons. For common configuration installation solutions, use a golden image. Golden image creation is described in Chapter 11 (page 151).

•You want a disaster recovery image of a system. For system-specific recovery solutions, you should use a recovery image. Recovery image creation is described in Chapter 15: “Recovery” (page 188).

Building PA-RISC Boot and Installation Tape

This section describes building a tape for just booting, or for boot and installation on PA-RISC systems. This functionality is not supported on Itanium-based systems, although you can utilize “Tape Recovery With No Tape Boot Support — Two-Step Media Recovery” (page 213).

IMPORTANT: The media and data format (density and compression) of the installation tape you create must be compatible with the tape devices of client systems on which it will be read. You should consider writing the tape using a device special file (DSF) that selects the most compatible data format settings.

Possible Tape Contents

A PA-RISC tape may consist of

•Just a LIF volume.

•A LIF volume followed by one or more archives (A1, A2, A3, ...).

•A LIF volume followed by an optional archive (A1, or Empty), a serial depot (D), and zero or more additional archives (A2, ...).

By far, the most common configuration is a LIF volume followed by one archive. The archive can be a golden archive or a recovery archive depending on the purpose of the media.

The high-level structures of possible PA-RISC installation tape layouts are shown below.

Why Use Custom Boot and Installation Media? 177