I have installed a USB drive on an HP Linux server. The USB drive is bootable and contains valid OS backups that I can restore the system from. I can update the backup easily at any time.
I now have the server boot to HDD, however, if at any point in the future, I wish to restore from the USB drive, I want to do a boot from the USB drive once only.
I see 2 possible solutions:
- Manage to use BIOS commands on reboot to change the boot order.
- Run a single command (possibly grub-reboot) to do a one time only boot from USB.
I was using option 1 but it is a real pain and I can't change the BIOS with some hardware. Can any advise on how I can tell Linux to reboot & boot from USB one time only?
I've read that grub-reboot may do it but everything is focused on booting to a Linux distro from Windows or similar.
GRUB version is 0.97.
Edit: This is a production server that in normal usage will boot from the HDD into Linux. Prior to software / OS upgrades / config changes, the following will occur (using Symantec NetBackup): - Script run to backup OS & config to USB drive. - Scripts run to backup DB, files etc to NetBackup server. - Upgrades performed. In case of requirement to rollback changes or complete failure or upgrade: - Boot from USB drive, re-install OS. - Reinstall other backups from NetBackup server. - Server has not received a bare metal restore to the condition prior to upgrade. In normal operation, if the server is rebooted, it is to boot from HDD. In extreme cases where we wish to perform a bare metal restore, we will need to boot from the USB. Ideally this will be done remotely. Accessing the BIOS remotely can be difficult with some hardware/putty setups so we would prefer to use a grub command to reboot from USB drive if possible.