zfs discuss - Dec 2005 - Anyone seen having a zfs pool on disks make the system unbootable?

I installed b27 on my new opteron based system. I had an old serial drive
(40G) which I made my boot drive. Once the system was up and running,
I made a pool on my 3 Sata drives.

I made the mistake of powering down the system last night (CPU fan
is loud).

The system would not boot up this morning. It would scan the drives and
just sit there. I could not get into the bios. I tried a boot CD and
no luck.

I ended up pulling the SATA drives and I can get to grub.

My guess is that the system is seeing the zfs pool and barfing. It was
able to boot when the SATA drives were empty.

What can I do to troubleshoot this?

All I can think of is that I need to zap the drives on another system...

System specs:
MSI K8N Master2-FAR Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce4 Professional ATX Server
Motherboard
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA

(A session log of creating the zfs pool, etc, is at
http://www.excfb.com/~nfsv4/wont.txt).

-- 
Tom Haynes
ex-cfb

That appears to be a known problem discusses recently on this list
with NVIDIA RAID BIOS, which swallows its tongue when encountering
EFI labeled SATA drive during the BIOS initialization.



Tom Haynes wrote:
> I installed b27 on my new opteron based system. I had an old serial drive
> (40G) which I made my boot drive. Once the system was up and running,
> I made a pool on my 3 Sata drives.
> 
> I made the mistake of powering down the system last night (CPU fan
> is loud).
> 
> The system would not boot up this morning. It would scan the drives and
> just sit there. I could not get into the bios. I tried a boot CD and
> no luck.
> 
> I ended up pulling the SATA drives and I can get to grub.
> 
> My guess is that the system is seeing the zfs pool and barfing. It was
> able to boot when the SATA drives were empty.
> 
> What can I do to troubleshoot this?
> 
> All I can think of is that I need to zap the drives on another system...
> 
> System specs:
> MSI K8N Master2-FAR Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce4 Professional ATX Server
Motherboard
> Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA
> 
> (A session log of creating the zfs pool, etc, is at
> http://www.excfb.com/~nfsv4/wont.txt).
>

>That appears to be a known problem discusses recently on this list
>with NVIDIA RAID BIOS, which swallows its tongue when encountering
>EFI labeled SATA drive during the BIOS initialization.
I''m not sure this is limited to nVidia.

Try to disable the card''s BIOSes.  (Generally, you can
set ports to "auto-detect" or "None" and then the OS will
still pickup the disk but the BIOS will ignore them)

Casper

On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 09:00:08PM +0100, Casper.Dik at Sun.COM
wrote:
> 
> >That appears to be a known problem discusses recently on this list
> >with NVIDIA RAID BIOS, which swallows its tongue when encountering
> >EFI labeled SATA drive during the BIOS initialization.
> 
> I''m not sure this is limited to nVidia.
> 
> Try to disable the card''s BIOSes.  (Generally, you can
> set ports to "auto-detect" or "None" and then the OS
will
> still pickup the disk but the BIOS will ignore them)
> 
> Casper
I''ve disabled the ports and the system gets past grub now. With
either the single user mode or the default, it will eventually
lock up while scanning for devices.

I also tried to boot from CDROM with basically the same effect.

I''m guessing I can reinstall from scratch and put a Sun VTOC
label on the drives...

-- 
Tom Haynes
ex-cfb