zfs discuss - May 2007 - ZFS Boot/Root system will no longer boot

Xorg was acting *very* strangely, so in my efforts to try and get back
to a state where I could actually get work done, I did the unthinkable.
I rebooted my box.  ;)

Not only did it not fix the problem, it made it worse!!  Now it won''t
even boot anymore!

What happens is the BIOS splash screen goes away, then I get a blinking
underline cursor in the upper left corner of the screen (still in text
mode) and that''s it.  GRUB never gets started past that.

I booted into the install CD, and I did a ''zpool import -f
tank'' and I
can see my pool alright (well, except I don''t know how to mount legacy
volumes it seems), and it did a boot archive during shutdown.

Is GRUB just hosed?  Is there an easy way to fix this?

If not, what is the best way to split the mirror so that I can install
to one of the disks and then import the old pool to get my data off of
it?  detatch one of the disks and install the new OS to that one?  I
sure hope it doesn''t come to re-installing though, that would suck. :)

Thanks!!!

-brian
-- 
"Perl can be fast and elegant as much as J2EE can be fast and elegant.
In the hands of a skilled artisan, it can and does happen; it''s just
that most of the shit out there is built by people who''d be better
suited to making sure that my burger is cooked thoroughly."  -- Jonathan
Patschke

Your boot-sector is lost (or not found)
Have you checked that BIOS is trying to boot from the correct disk.
My MSI-card bit me exacltly like this last time i plugged inn an aditional disk.
I had rebooted, but not powercycled.
When I powercycled, the BIOS detected new HW and came up with the incredible
idea that the new factory-blank disk should be the primary boot-device and not
those I had configured as boot-disks (SDS mirror i my case) -- and for some
reason it thought there was a boot-sector there and started to execute the
random bits..probably \0 == NOOP. Seems like a bad BIOS-bug.
My fix was simply to reconfigure the BIOS boot-order (and make sure I powercycle
next time I rearrange HW that supposedly was hot-swap.. ).
If that''s not the case you''ll probably need to do installgrub
(manpage has an example but I dont know if it needs special tweaking for
zfs-boot)
 
 
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