Setting up an HP RAID 4Si Controller As a Boot Device

You can set up any HP RAID 4Si controller as a boot device. To do this, you actually set up a logical drive on the controller as a boot device. On each controller, you can make any number of its logical drives boot devices. For example, if you have two controllers in a system, and each controller has three logical drives configured for it, you could set up two logical drives on one controller as boot devices, and all three logical drives on the other controller as boot devices. This would give you a total of five boot devices. Or, if you wanted to, you could even make all six logical drives boot devices.

The general flow of steps you need to do to set up an HP RAID 4Si controller as a boot device is shown below. The specific steps are described in the next section, “Installing HP-UX on a Logical Drive”. Note that the flow below assumes the controller is already installed, and you have decided to make it a boot device. (See “Planning Your Configuration” for things to consider when you are deciding whether to use a controller as a boot device.)

Things to Keep in Mind

Some things to keep in mind about using logical drives as boot devices:

• While you are using a logical drive as a boot device (that is, while the OS is running on it), you can use only View/Add Configuration, and are limited in the configuration tasks you can do in IRM. This is because IRM sees the logical drive as being in use, so any kind of configuration changes affecting that drive are not allowed until you are no longer using it as the boot device. Note that deleting the last logical drive configured is also not allowed, even if the drive you want to delete is not the logical drive being used as the boot device.

• When you are no longer using a logical drive as a boot device, if you clear the controller's configuration—by doing either a New Configuration or a Clear Configuration—that logical drive is deleted, too. So, it is no longer set up as a boot device. If you want it to still be a boot device, you must do the entire setup process again.