Multiboot & external drive

[marko asplund]

hi

we have a HP Visualize B2000 workstation running HP-UX 11.00 which i need to upgrade to 11i. we still have use for the old OS so i'd like to preserve it if possible. can i plug an external SCSI drive to the system, install 11i on the external disk and boot the machine from there? is it possible to make it a multiboot system where i could choose which operating system to boot on powerup? can anyone give pointers for documentation describing this sort of configuration?

best regards,
aspa

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

yes you can certainly do this.
On ecommand to look at is setboot.
This alows you to display AND modify your NVRAM boot settings, so if you ar erunning your 11i OS, you can run setboot to change the bootpath to reflect the 11.00 OS disc, then reboot and it should boot from that disc. The reverse applies, in fact you could setup a script for this on each disc.
If you wish to do this at system boot time, then set one of the discs as the primary path, the other being set as the ALTpath.
Then when you go to boot, interrupt the autobot and select the path you wish to boot from.