On the DECstation 2100 and 3100, the path used for automatic booting is stored in the
bootpath environment variable. The path is made up of a device type specifier (e.g., rz, tz, mop or tftp) followed by a triplet in the form (x,y,z), followed by a filename to load.
Within the triplet, x is the controller (always 0), y is the SCSI id of the drive to boot from or 0 for net boots, and z is the partition to boot from (usually 0 for SCSI devices, always zero for network booting). For both disk and network boots, () may be specified instead of (0,0,0).
The filename is optional for bootp/tftp and mop booting, since in these cases the network protocol can be used to determine which file to boot. When booting off the tape, no filename should be specified. When booting off of disk, the filename is optional but is usually specified. If no filename is specified when booting off disk, the following filenames are tried in order:
netbsd.pmax,
netbsd,
netbsd.gz,
netbsd.bak,
netbsd.old,
onetbsd,
gennetbsd. Generally, the kernel is named
netbsd.
An example bootpath setting would be:
setenv bootpath rz(0,1,0)netbsd
At the PROM prompt, the user may boot
NetBSD with either the
auto or the
boot command. If the
auto command is used, the
-a argument is passed to the kernel, requesting a multi-user boot; otherwise the
-s argument is passed, requesting that
NetBSD boot to single user mode.
When either the
boot or the
auto command is issued with no arguments, the kernel specified in the bootpath environment variable is booted. With the
boot command, an alternative kernel may be specified with the
-f flag, followed by the path of the kernel to boot, as described above. For example:
boot -f rz(0,4,0)netbsd.new