Loader, MBR and the boot process

[Dan Naumov]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:12 AM, Thomas K. <fwd at gothschlampen.com> wrote:
> 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

At first you made me feel silly, but then I decided to double-check, I
uncommented the swap line in the partitioning part again, ensured I
was writing the bootloader to "${TARGETDISK}"s1b and ran the script.
Same problem, hangs at loader. Again, if I comment out the swap,
giving the entire slice to ZFS and then write the bootloader to
"${TARGETDISK}"s1a, run the script, everything works.


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov