RHEL5 Installation Guide - 4.27.2. Booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux Automatically

4.27.2. Booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux Automatically

After installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux you can type elilo and any boot options at the EFI Shell prompt each time you wish to boot your Itanium system. However, if you wish to configure your system to boot into Red Hat Enterprise Linux automatically, you need to configure the EFI Boot Manager .

To configure the EFI Boot Manager (may vary slightly depending on your hardware):

Boot the Itanium system and choose Boot option maintenance menu from the EFI Boot Manager menu.
Choose Add a Boot Option from the Main Menu.
Select the system partition that is mounted as /boot/efi/ in Linux.
Select the elilo.efi file.
At the Enter New Description: prompt, type Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 , or any name that you want to appear on the EFI Boot Manager menu.
At the Enter Boot Option Data Type: prompt, enter N for No Boot Option if you do not want to pass options to the ELILO boot loader. This option works for most cases. If you want to pass options to the boot loader, you can configure it in the /boot/efi/elilo.conf configuration file instead.
Answer Yes to the Save changes to NVRAM prompt. This returns you to the EFI Boot Maintenance Manager menu.
Next, you want to make the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 menu item the default. A list of boot options appears. Move the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 menu item up to the top of the list by selecting it with the arrow keys and pressing the u key to move it up the list. You can move items down the list by selecting it and pressing the d key. After changing the boot order, choose Save changes to NVRAM . Choose Exit to return to the Main Menu.
Optionally, you can change the boot timeout value by choosing Set Auto Boot TimeOut => Set Timeout Value from the Main Menu.
Return to the EFI Boot Manager by selecting Exit .

4.27.2.1. Using a Startup Script

The startup.nsh script should be in the /boot/efi partition (/boot/efi/startup.nsh) and contain the following text:

echo -off 
your set of commands
 elilo

If you want to pass options to the boot loader (refer to Section 4.27.1, “Post-Installation Boot Loader Options”) add them after elilo .

You can either create this file after booting into Red Hat Enterprise Linux or use the editor built into the EFI shell. To use the EFI shell, at the Shell> prompt, change devices to the system partition (mounted as /boot/efi in Linux). For example, if fs0 is the system boot partition, type fs0: at the EFI Shell prompt. Type ls to make sure you are in the correct partition. Then type edit startup.nsh. Type the contents of the file and save it.

The next time the system boots, EFI detects the startup.nsh file and use it to boot the system. To stop EFI from loading the file, type Ctrl - c . This aborts the process, and returns you to the EFI shell prompt.