Minimal OS Boot CD and mediainit

[David Bosiljevac]

Hi,

I'm trying to find out whether or not it's possible to create a minimal OS boot that can be done off of a CD. Once the OS boots up, I need it to run mediainit on all drives in the system, and then halt the system when all disks have been wiped clean.

Basically, it needs to be done so that somebody who's not technically proficient in HP-UX can boot the system up with minimal keystrokes.

I was looking at make_sys_image and make_medialif, but I'm not sure if that's the right way to go.

Does anybody have any thoughts about how I might be able to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance.

[Martin Burnett_2]

Hi David,

Can you give us a little more information:

1. What kind of systems? (workstations, servers, A,D,K,L,N class) A "one size fits all" may be more difficult.

2. All you want to do is format the disks? Are you preparing them for something or just making sure any data on them is destroyed? Since you are not installing I am assuming you just want to destroy any data on the disks.

The Ignite Information library contains information on creating customized install media:

http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/docs/Customized_Install_Media_Paper.pdf

If there is no attempt to install an operating system I would recommend that you take a look at PA-Linux. Here again depending on what type of HW you are going to use:

http://www.parisc-linux.org/hardware/supported.html

This site contains an image (PA-Linux) already created that can be placed onto a CD, booted and use fdisk to format the drives and then bail out of the installation program. The installation is menu driven so it would not be difficult to document the steps and hand your "basic user" a cheat sheet. The Base?network Install image is only 38 MB!

http://www.parisc-linux.org/release-0.9/index.html

Or you could look at creating something of your own. There are precompiled kernels for systems located here:

ftp://ftp.parisc-linux.org/kernels/

Thanks for participating in the forums,

Martin
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.

[Kelli Ward]

Hi,
If you have an HP-UX install CD, you can push a shell during startup and should be able to perform mediainit's through it.
You can also create an ignite tape and use an interactive recovery to push a shell, if you were interested in using DDS.
Two possible quick options for you.
Your operator could be taught with a simple written procedure.
Good luck,
Kel

[David Bosiljevac]

Basically, what I'm trying to accomplish is having a person sit down at the machine, interrupt the boot sequence and boot off of a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM would load whatever it needs to do and run a script that we have to do a mediainit on all hard drives attached to the system.

I'm looking to do it on systems ranging from old Apollos to B class workstations, 715's, 712's, up to D class servers - so basically any HP 9000 type of machine.

Don't know if it's possible or not, but I'd like to see if it is.

Thanks.

[Kelli Ward]

Hi David,
FYI- I spoke out of turn. (Sorry, 'bout that)
I just checked my 11.0 install.
I pushed a shell and mediainit is not on it.
I shouldn't have assumed there was a way to initalize a disk on it.
(Must have been thinking SAM.)
Unfortunately, I can't think of an off the top of my head way to accomplish this on a CD.
Would it be possible for you to actually build a hard drive with HP-UX on it, create a user account with an auto-launching script to mediainit that drive and set mediainits permissions so that user account can use the mediainit command. The script can autoreboot on completion. Set it up so the user only has to boot the system (and perhaps log in) and this should minimize the danger of accidently mediainiting your boot drive.
Good luck,
Kel

[David Bosiljevac]

I've been rethinking my strategy a bit and I think I've come up with a better scenario for the people to do the disk wiping. Now I just need to find out whether it's possible or not.

During an O/S installation, there comes a point where you can continue installation, run a recovery shell and go to advanced options. In the recovery shell, everything is loaded onto a RAM disk, I believe. You can then add a piece of software like mediainit and run it.

My question - is it possible to go directly into the recovery shell when booting up, bypassing any installation options? This way, the persons doing the disk wiping can load the mediainit software and the script we use, then run it.

I think this would serve our purposes better than having a disk with a specific kernel on it.