zfs discuss - Oct 2006 - system hangs on POST after giving zfs a drive

I *just* figgured out this problem, looking for a potential solution (or at the
very least some validation that i''m not crazy)

Okay, so here''s the deal. I''ve been using this terrible
horrible no-good very bad hackup of a couple partitions spread across 3 drives
as a zpool.

I got sick of having to dig up the info of what slices do what every time I need
to do something, so I shuffled around some data & created a new zpool out of
my SATA drive. ( [i]# zpool create xenophanes c2d0[/i] ).

Everything works, etc. for a while, then I rebooted the machine. 

As it turns out now, something about the drive is causing the machine to hang on
POST. It boots fine if the drive isn''t connected, and if I hot plug the
drive after the machine boots, it works fine, but the computer simply will not
boot with the drive attatched.

any thoughts on resolution?
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On 10/11/06, John Sonnenschein <johnsonnenschein at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> As it turns out now, something about the drive is causing the machine to
hang on POST. It boots fine if the drive isn''t connected, and if I hot
plug the drive after the machine boots, it works fine, but the computer simply
will not boot with the drive attatched.
>
> any thoughts on resolution?
Are you using an nforce4 based board?

I have a Tyan K8E, and it hangs on boot if there are EFI labeled disks
present.  (Which is what ZFS uses when you give it whole disks.)  If this
is the problem, configure the BIOS settings so as to not probe those
disks, and then it should boot.

Of course, it won''t be possible to boot off those disks, but they
should
work fine in Solaris.

Chris

John Sonnenschein wrote:
> I *just* figgured out this problem, looking for a potential solution
> (or at the very least some validation that i''m not crazy)
> 
> Okay, so here''s the deal. I''ve been using this terrible
horrible
> no-good very bad hackup of a couple partitions spread across 3 drives
> as a zpool.
> 
> I got sick of having to dig up the info of what slices do what every
> time I need to do something, so I shuffled around some data & created
> a new zpool out of my SATA drive. ( [i]# zpool create xenophanes
> c2d0[/i] ).
> 
> Everything works, etc. for a while, then I rebooted the machine.
> 
> As it turns out now, something about the drive is causing the machine
> to hang on POST. It boots fine if the drive isn''t connected, and
if I
> hot plug the drive after the machine boots, it works fine, but the
> computer simply will not boot with the drive attatched.
As I recall, some BIOSs get confused by EFI labels, which ZFS uses when 
you give it a whole disk (as opposed to just a slice).  You might want 
to see if there''s a BIOS update available for your motherboard, or 
search this forum for a previous thread on this topic, or maybe someone 
here has a better memory that I do...

--matt

well, it''s an SiS 960 board, and it appears my only option to turn off
probing of the drives is to enable RAID mode (which makes them inacessable by
the OS)

what would be my next (cheapest) option, a proper SATA add-in card?
I''ve heard good things about the silicon image 3132 based cards, but
I''m not sure if they''ll still leave my BIOS in the same
position if i run the drives in ATA mode
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On 10/12/06, John Sonnenschein <johnsonnenschein at gmail.com>
wrote:
> well, it''s an SiS 960 board, and it appears my only option to turn
off probing of the drives is to enable RAID mode (which makes them inacessable
by the OS)
I think the option is in the standard CMOS setup section, and allows you
to set the disk geometry, translation, etc.  There should be options for each
disk, something like: auto detect/manual/not present.  Hopefully your BIOS
has a similar setting.
> what would be my next (cheapest) option, a proper SATA add-in card?
I''ve heard good things about the silicon image 3132 based cards, but
I''m not sure if they''ll still leave my BIOS in the same
position if i run the drives in ATA mode
The best supported card is the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8.  Drivers are
also present for the SiI 3132/3124 based cards in the SATA framework,
but they haven''t been updated in a while, and don''t support
NCQ yet.

Either way, unless you are using a recent nevada build, any controller
will only run in compatibility mode.

Chris

John Sonnenschein wrote:
> I *just* figgured out this problem, looking for a potential solution (or at
the very least some validation that i''m not crazy)
> 
> Okay, so here''s the deal. I''ve been using this terrible
horrible no-good very bad hackup of a couple partitions spread across 3 drives
as a zpool.
> 
> I got sick of having to dig up the info of what slices do what every time I
need to do something, so I shuffled around some data & created a new zpool
out of my SATA drive. ( [i]# zpool create xenophanes c2d0[/i] ).
> 
> Everything works, etc. for a while, then I rebooted the machine. 
> 
> As it turns out now, something about the drive is causing the machine to
hang on POST. It boots fine if the drive isn''t connected, and if I hot
plug the drive after the machine boots, it works fine, but the computer simply
will not boot with the drive attatched.
> 
> any thoughts on resolution?
>  
>  
When you give ZFS a whole drive, it writes a EFI label
on the disk.  Some bios vendors'' products choke when
they taste this label; the Tyan 2865 does this.

Go to the BIOS screen and disable probing for that
disk; tell the BIOS there is nothing there (turn off
AUTO mode).  Then power cycle (NOT reset) the box and
it should boot w/o further problems.

- Bart (who ran into this on his home server).


-- 
Bart Smaalders			Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com		http://blogs.sun.com/barts