zfs discuss - Nov 2007 - Lock when booting on SATA disk with ZFS

hi there,

Last week i''ve installed 3 disks Western Digital 250GB on ZFS.

All that time, i was able to put file on it, move, copy...  everything worked
fine, cool!

But, i needed to reboot the computer, so i did it, but then, when the Bios
detect all the disk, it stop after that.  I can''t go in the config by
pressing DEL, it stay there.

My motherboard is a MSI Neo2 Platinum with 4 SATA-150MB port.

I''ve tried to plug only 1 of these drive, as soon as one of them (disk
that i''ve installed zfs) it lock right after the disk detection.

Is someone else did have this problem, or know what happen ?  I did a lot of
test without any success.

Is zfs causing all this? does it write something at the beginning of the drive
that can cause this behavior ?

Thanks,
Ben.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

>Is zfs causing all this? does it write something at the beginning of the
>drive that can cause this behavior ?
Well, "cause" is not the correct term here.

We''ve found that quite a few motherboards have buggy BIOSes; as soon as
the
BIOS sees a drive, it tries to read some data from it and in case of EFI
labels this causes the BIOS software to crash.

Generally, this can be worked around in the following manner:


	- remove the affected disks.

	- change the BIOS to ignore the selected disks/controllers during
	  boot/test, this could mean any of the steps:
		- remove device from boot order
		- prevent device BIOS extensions from executing
		- etc.

	- reinsert the affected disks.

It''s an, unfortunately, very common issue.

Option 0 to try might be: upgrade BIOS.

Casper

It is now solved!  thanks to Casper and billm

this is the mail i''ve received from Casper, i don''t know why i
didn''t saw it here in the forum but...
>>Is zfs causing all this? does it write something at the beginning of the
>>drive that can cause this behavior ?
>
>Well, "cause" is not the correct term here.
>
>We''ve found that quite a few motherboards have buggy BIOSes; as
soon as the
>BIOS sees a drive, it tries to read some data from it and in case of EFI
>labels this causes the BIOS software to crash.
>
>Generally, this can be worked around in the following manner:
>- remove the affected disks.
>- change the BIOS to ignore the selected disks/controllers during
>         boot/test, this could mean any of the steps:
>         - remove device from boot order
>         - prevent device BIOS extensions from executing
>         - etc.
>
>- reinsert the affected disks.
>
>It''s an, unfortunately, very common issue.
>Option 0 to try might be: upgrade BIOS.
>
>Casper
So at that time, i know that it is something about the EFI label, i have tried
what Casper told me in the Bios, but i cannot disable completely a drive from
the boot disk list.  But i''ve search about the EFI labels and found
this old post of 2005:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=18116#18116

So i followed billm advice and i did these step to make everything works after a
reboot:

- Plug the power on the HD, without the sata cable and boot directly into
Solaris 10
- Plug the SATA back on & run format -e
- selected the first disk in problem in the list
- typed: fdisk
- deleted the EFI partition, create a standard Solaris partition at 100% (have
to create a Solaris2 then used the menu option to change it back to Solaris)
- Option 5 to exit and save the fdisk changes
- typed: "label" & select option #0: SMI
- exit format and back to do the same step on the 2 others disks

Then, i think that the EFI was done with creating the pool in raindz using the
hole disk instead of using one partition only so instead of doing:
# zpool create mypool raidz c1d0 c2d0 c3d0
i did:
# zpool create mypool raid c1d0p0 c2d0p0 c3d0p0

Then, a zfs create mypool/test & a reboot

Everything works fine now !!!  thanks !

Ben.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org