zfs discuss - Dec 2009 - Boot from external degraded zpool

Hi!

I wonder if the following scenario works:

I have a mac mini running as an OSOL box. The OS is installed on the internal
hard drive on the vdrive rpool. On rpool there is no redundancy.

If I add an external block device (USB / Firewire) to rpool to mirror the
internal hard drive and if the internal hard drive fails, can I reboot the
system with the detached internal drive but with the degraded mirror half on the
external drive?

The mac is definitely capable of booting from all kinds of devices. But does
OSOL support it in such a way, described above?

Regards,
Martin

On Wed, 30 Dec 2009, Dr. Martin Mundschenk wrote:
>
> I have a mac mini running as an OSOL box. The OS is installed on the 
> internal hard drive on the vdrive rpool. On rpool there is no 
> redundancy.
>
> If I add an external block device (USB / Firewire) to rpool to 
> mirror the internal hard drive and if the internal hard drive fails, 
> can I reboot the system with the detached internal drive but with 
> the degraded mirror half on the external drive?
I think that this should work.  It depends on the ability of GRUB to 
boot from your USB/Firewire drive.  If you add the mirror drive, you 
should be able to test GRUB''s ability to boot from it via the GRUB 
menu.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/