Activating a Boot Environment

Activating a boot environment makes it bootable on the next reboot of the system. You can also switch back quickly to the original boot environment if a failure occurs on booting the newly active boot environment. See SPARC: To Fall Back to the Original Boot Environment.

To successfully activate a boot environment, that boot environment must meet the following conditions:

• The boot environment must have a status of “complete.” To check status see Displaying the Status of All Boot Environments.

• If the boot environment is not the current boot environment, you cannot have mounted the partitions of that boot environment by using lumount(1M) or mount(1M)).

• The boot environment you want to activate cannot be involved in a comparison operation. See Comparing Boot Environments.

If you want to reconfigure swap, make this change prior to booting the inactive boot environment. By default, all boot environments share the same swap devices. To reconfigure swap, see “Creating a New Boot Environment,” Step 9 or To Create a Boot Environment and Reconfigure Swap (Command-Line Interface).

x86: (Optional) Update Boot Diskette Before Activating

If you're not using the Solaris 8 Device Configuration Assistant Intel Platform Edition diskette to boot the system, you can skip this procedure. If you use the Device Configuration Assistant to boot, you need to update the boot diskette. This procedure matches a boot diskette to your release by overwriting the existing diskette or writing to a new one.

1. Insert the diskette. This is either the existing diskette that is overwirtten or a new diskette.

2. Update the boot diskette with the latest image for this release.

3. Eject the boot diskette.

4. Type:

   volcheck

5. Copy the new boot environment's boot/solaris/bootenv.rc file to the diskette.

   cp /a/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc /floppy/floppy0/solaris/bootenv.rc

6. Check the input-device and output-device on the diskette to make sure they are correct. If not then update them.

   You are ready to activate the new boot environment.

To Activate a Boot Environment (Character Interface)

1. From the Solaris Live Upgrade main menu, select Activate.

2. Type the name of the boot environment to make active:

   Name of Boot Environment: solaris_8 Do you want to force a Live Upgrade sync operations: no

3. You can either continue or synchronize files.

   • Press Return to continue.

     No file synchronization is done.

   • If it has been some time since you created the inactive boot environment, you might want to synchronize files. To synchronize files, type:

     Do you want to force a Live Upgrade sync operations: yes

4. Press F3 to begin the activation process.

5. Press Return to continue.

   The new boot environment is activated at the next reboot.

6. To activate the inactive boot environment, reboot:

   # init 6

To Activate a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

1. Log in as superuser.

2. (Optional) To check on which boot environment is activated on the next reboot, type:

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate

3. To activate the boot environment, type:

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate BE_name

   BE_name

   Specifies the name of the boot environment that is to be activated.

   ---

   Example 4–5 Activating a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

   
   

   In this example, the second_disk boot environment is activated at the next reboot.

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate second_disk

   ---

4. Reboot.

   # init 6

To Activate a Boot Environment and Synchronize Files (Command-Line Interface)

The first time you boot from a newly created boot environment, Live Upgrade software synchronizes this boot environment with the boot environment that was last active. (This is not necessarily the boot environment that was the source for the newly created boot environment.) It does not perform this synchronization after this initial boot, unless you use the -s option. Use this option with great caution, because you might not be aware or in control of changes that might have occurred in the last active boot environment.

1. Log in as superuser.

2. (Optional) To check on which boot environment is activated on the next reboot, type:

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate

3. To activate the boot environment, type:

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate -s BE_name

   BE_name	Specifies the name of the boot environment that is to be activated.
   -s	Forced synchronization.

   ---

   Example 4–6 Activating a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

   
   

   In this example, the second_disk boot environment is activated at the next reboot and the files are synchronized.

   # /usr/sbin/luactivate -s second_disk

   ---

4. Reboot.

   # init 6