swriteboot(8)

NAME
swriteboot - Write secondary SRM bootloader to harddisk.

SYNOPSIS
swriteboot [-v] [-f#] <dev> <bootloader> [kernel]

DESCRIPTION
swriteboot can be used to write a secondary bootstrap loader and - optionally - a kernel to a harddisk. The loader is written in a way that allows the SRM firmware to boot from that disk (SRM is the firmware that is also used to boot HP Tru64, OpenVMS and *BSD). Specifically, the loader is written to occupy a physically contiguous range of sectors starting at sector 2 and the first sector is updated such that the SRM firmware can find the boot loader. swriteboot may fail if the bootstrap loader is too big to fit into the sectors reserved for boot purposes. It is therefore suggested to reserve the first 512 sectors of a harddisk for boot purposes. This will leave 256 kB of space for a secondary bootstrap loader which should be plenty (currently, the aboot(8) bootstrap loader is about 90 kB large). Use more if you want to have a kernel in this area, too - 2 MB should be sufficient in this case.

The <dev> argument specifies the special device to which the <bootloader> file should be written to. The boot loader file must be a header-less image (not an object file) containing the raw contents of the text, data, and bss sections. A typical command to make SCSI disk 0 bootable with the aboot(8) loader is shown below: swriteboot /dev/sda bootlx

The -v option makes swriteboot be a bit more verbose.

The -f# option tells swriteboot to ignore an overlap of the boot area with partition #.

The -c# option explicitly tells swriteboot the boot partition. If this argument is missing, then swriteboot tries to autodetect the boot partition if possible. Note that you can set the boot partition later on with abootconf(8) as well.

SEE ALSO
aboot(8), abootconf(8), mke2fs(8), e2writeboot(8)

AUTHORS
Bob Manson <manson@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Michael Schwingen <michael@schwingen.org>
Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de> (Update of man page)