A method is implemented by a system on chip and includes: receiving a volume attaching request sent by the public cloud management component, where the volume attaching request includes an identifier of a system volume; and storing the identifier of the system volume based on the volume attaching request, where when the bare-metal server is started, the bare-metal server uses the identifier of the system volume to determine the system volume, and starts an operating system of the bare-metal server based on the system volume, and the system volume stores a file used for starting the operating system of the bare-metal server.