Power fail and crash recovery

Unfortunately, on most machines, the system can't reboot itself at power-up or after crashes. You might have to restart the system manually. Once the system 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

Typical MIPS based Windows CE Handheld machines attempt to boot Windows CE operating system in its own boot ROM. You can't boot the NetBSD directly skipping Windows CE. The NetBSD bootloaders are provided as application programs on Windows CE instead. You can choose pbsdboot(8) or hpcboot(8). Though the bootloaders are application programs, they blow away the entire Windows CE OS and its settings when the kernel boots successfully.

Normal Operation

Once running, a familiar window will appear. You can choose the machine type, kernel file location and kernel boot options with a GUI and push the button named “[boot]” to boot NetBSD.

Automatic mode

The bootloaders have an “auto boot” option. If you enable this option, the specified kernel will be loaded automatically after a countdown.