Power fail and crash recovery

Unfortunately, NetBSD can't reboot itself at power-up or after crashes. The machine will go through the cold reset and boot into Windows CE. You will have to restart NetBSD manually using hpcboot(8).

Once NetBSD starts, an automatic consistency check of the file systems will be performed, and unless this fails, the system will resume multi-user operations.

Cold starts

On cold reset Windows CE handheld machines attempt to boot the Windows CE operating system from the boot ROM. The boot ROM is usually not rewritable, so you cannot erase or damage Windows CE image.

You can't boot NetBSD directly, skipping Windows CE. The NetBSD bootloader, hpcboot(8), is provided as a Windows CE application program instead. Though the bootloader is an application program, it blows the entire running Windows CE, its data, and its settings away from RAM (but not ROM!) when the kernel boots successfully. If NetBSD is halted the machine will go through the cold reset and will reboot into Windows CE.

Normal Operation

Please, refer to the hpcboot(8) manual page.