Determine boot device from BIOS

exactiv · 10-10-2012, 06:13 AM

I need to determine the boot order that is set in my BIOS. I have a variety of distros and hardware to do this on so a universal query would be great. For example, I have SuSE9 & 10 and various versions of RH 5. Some vmware, some cisco ucs and some IBM blades. This is easy to do in AIX: bootlist -m normal -o

Is there no similar command in Linux??

Thanks!

malekmustaq · 10-10-2012, 11:06 AM

How many hard drives does your machine run? You can do it from the BIOS preference: hit F2 or F10 or F11 when the boot reads the board firmware you will be taken into the BIOS, usually. There you can fix it.

IF you mean which partition (of the many OS's you listed above) you wanted to set in preferential order you cannot do it from the BIOS, rather you will have to do it from the Boot Loader.

What are you using: Grub Legacy? Grub 2? Lilo?

You need to give us the answer before we can help.

exactiv · 10-10-2012, 11:12 AM

I have around 150 servers to check this on and I want to script it. It would take too long to manually check the BIOS setting.

Boot loader on all is Grub 2.

Reuti · 10-11-2012, 06:13 AM

I’m not aware that there is a general Linux tool to get this information. With some machines from Dell or SUN/Oracle you can either use ipmitool or log into the management interface with ssh to get/set some of this information. But this depends on the particular machine, whether it’s supported.