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.