During a miniroot load, the miniroot is transferred to the swap partition on the target by a program called the sash, or standalone shell. The sash is a a component of the installation tools that accompany some products (see Figure 1-1).
Caution: The miniroot is copied from the distribution source to partition 1 of your system disk, which is normally the swap partition. If you have customized your system in such a way that partition 1 contains valid data, be sure to back up the data in partition 1 prior to the miniroot installation to avoid losing it. The miniroot contains an IRIX kernel, Inst, and other tools and files. By default, the miniroot restricts the target to installation operations, and the target operates like an ASCII terminal, even on graphics systems. These restrictions preserve the integrity of the operating system while it is being updated.
You access the installation tools on a distribution source from the PROM monitor, the user interface to the programmable read-only memory (PROM) of the target system. The commands that you enter using the PROM monitor load the miniroot and automatically invoke Inst. The PROM monitor features menus and prompts and a command line interpreter, the command monitor, which supports a small set of commands for performing simple functions.