amd64/160801: zfsboot on 8.2-RELEASE fails to boot from root-on-zfs in MBR slice

[Camillo Särs]

The following reply was made to PR kern/160801; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Camillo_S=E4rs?= <ged at iki.fi>
To: John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org>
Cc: freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org, freebsd-gnats-submit at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: amd64/160801: zfsboot on 8.2-RELEASE fails to boot from root-on-zfs
 in MBR slice
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:07:26 +0300

 Hi,
 
 On 2011-09-19 15:02, John Baldwin wrote:
 >> Install zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2, where the problem is fixed.
 > 
 > Can you test 8.2-stable?  The various fixes made to zfsboot in 9 were merged 
 > to 8 after 8.2-release.
 
 Unfortunately fixing this issue by installing zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2 was
 a surprising amount of work, because of an incompatibility between the
 9.0 USB installer GPT and the BIOS on this system.  It took quite a
 while to recognize the root cause for that one.  I simply cannot boot
 the system in question with the GPT pmbr used on the memstick of 9.0.
 The BIOS locks completely.
 
 I am very reluctant to risk breaking my currently running system, the
 previous boot failure caused almost two weeks of downtime.
 
 Does the 8.2-stable memstick image still use MBR?  If so, I could
 conceivably try to copy the 9.0 zfsboot version to the 8.2-stable
 memstick and test both.
 
 Regards,
 Camillo