Patent ID: 7861117

Claim:
A method of automatic recovery of an operating system (OS) from at least one of a boot device failure and an initial program load (IPL) failure, comprising: receiving a user selected option of an action upon an event of a failure; complying with the user selected option without real time user intervention, further including: maintaining a bootlist for a server of a plurality of boot devices, further including: maintaining an order of selection of a selected boot device and a plurality of reduced priority boot devices on the bootlist; deallocating a failed boot device; reducing a priority of a boot device on the bootlist; removing a boot device from the bootlist; detecting a failure; attempting a reboot of the server and an IPL with the selected boot device; detecting success or failure of the selected boot device; notifying a user of the success or failure of the selected boot device; updating the order of selection of boot devices on the bootlist; selecting a reduced priority boot device from the bootlist; attempting a reboot of the server and an IPL with the reduced priority boot device; continuing the reboot of the server and the IPL attempts using the reduced priority boot devices from the bootlist until detection of a boot success and an IPL success; detecting no further boot devices available on the bootlist to successfully complete the boot success and the IPL success, and; notifying a user of the failure.