Zfs mounting issue post install

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cheasully
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2017 9:09 am

Zfs mounting issue post install

Post by cheasully »

Hello all,
This I assume is a general freebsd issue but as I am using ghost I might as well post this here.
After initial install (ghost 11.0 via USB IMG to SD card on thinkpad x200) boot loader hangs with:
Mounting from zfs:tank/ROOT/initial failed with error 2: unknown file system.
However, if I keep the bootable USB medium in the machine everything loads fine..
Anyone else ran into this issue?
cheasully
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2017 9:09 am

Re: Zfs mounting issue post install

Post by cheasully »

Alright so I figured out that booting from a USB by default is recognized as da0 and the SD card I'm trying to install to is recognized as da1. So whenever I reboot it's looking for da1 which doesn't exist unless my USB is plugged in at the same time during boot...
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Zfs mounting issue post install

Post by kraileth »

Hi cheasully,

that sounds like a good explanation of what's happening. However I would expect this happening with UFS and not ZFS. UFS partitions are mounted during system startup according to /etc/fstab. It's very much possible that the installer puts da1 in there and it should be da0 if the USB drive is not attached.

ZFS works per pool and it should not make any difference on which drive a pool exists since the system will look on all available devices for importable pools.

I once had an error like the one that you have, though. However in my case it was a mixed system with a ZFS pool and a gmirror and the error was some side-effect of me wanting to fix a problem with the latter. I was a bit under pressure and did not take notes. So unfortunately I don't remember what the exact error message was nor what I did in the end.

Since I don't have any hardware matching your scenario I cannot recreate it. But there's quite a bit of material about problems like that on the net. If you manage to solve it, please report back!
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