freebsd stable - Jan 2010 - Loader, MBR and the boot process

I recently found a nifty "FreeBSD ZFS root installation script" and
been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it
from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I
had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get
stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen
different things, it downed on me to change the partition order inside
the slice, I had 1) swap 2) freebsd-zfs and for the test, I got rid of
swap altogether and gave the entire slice to the freebsd-zfs
partition. Suddenly, my problem went away and the system booted just
fine. So it seems that Loader requires that the partition containing
the files vital to the boot is the first partition on the slice and
that "swap first, then the rest" doesn't work.

The thing is, I am absolutely positive that in the past, I've had
sysinstall created installs using MBR partitioning and that I had swap
as my first partition inside the slice and that it all worked dandy.
Has this changed at some point? Oh, and for the curious the
installation script is here: http://jago.pp.fi/zfsmbrv1-works.sh


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 05:57:23AM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote:

Hi,
> I recently found a nifty "FreeBSD ZFS root installation script"
and
> been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it
> from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I
> had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get
> stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen
probably this line is the cause:

dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/"${TARGETDISK}"s1a skip=1 seek=1024

Unless by "swap first" you meant the on-disk location, and not the
partition letter. If swap is partition "a", you're writing the
loader
into swapspace.


Regards,
Thomas