104Administering disks

Rootability

Booting root volumes

Note: At boot time, the system firmware provides you with a short time period during which you can manually override the automatic boot process and select an alternate boot device. For information on how to boot your system from a device other than the primary or alternate boot devices, and how to change the primary and alternate boot devices, see the HP-UX documentation and the boot(1M), pdc(1M) and isl(1M) manual pages.

Before the kernel mounts the root file system, it determines if the boot disk is a rootable VxVM disk. If it is such a disk, the kernel passes control to its VxVM rootability code. This code extracts the starting block number and length of the root and swap volumes from the LIF LABEL record, builds temporary volume and disk configuration objects for these volumes, and then loads this configuration into the VxVM kernel driver. At this point, I/O can take place for these temporary root and swap volumes by referencing the device number set up by the rootability code.

When the kernel has passed control to the initial user procedure, the VxVM configuration daemon (vxconfigd) is started. vxconfigd reads the configuration of the volumes in the bootdg disk group and loads them into the kernel. The temporary root and swap volumes are then discarded. Further I/O for these volumes is performed using the VxVM configuration objects that were loaded into the kernel.

Setting up a VxVM root disk and mirror

Note: These procedures should be carried out at init level 1.

To set up a VxVM root disk and a bootable mirror of this disk, use the

vxcp_lvmroot utility. This command initializes a specified physical disk as a VxVM root disk named rootdisk## (where ## is the first number starting at 01 that creates a unique disk name), copies the contents of the volumes on the LVM root disk to the new VxVM root disk, optionally creates a mirror of the VxVM root disk on another specified physical disk, and make the VxVM root disk and its mirror (if any) bootable by HP-UX.

The following example shows how to set up a VxVM root disk on the physical disk c0t4d0:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxcp_lvmroot -b c0t4d0