Removing all ZFS support from boot process

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 11/02/2011, at 21:03, Mark Powell wrote:
>> Can you take a picture of where it hangs? (you will have to host it somewhere though, as the list will reject non text attachments).
> 
> Here you go:
> 
> http://galatea.salford.ac.uk/aix502/11022011448.jpg
> http://galatea.salford.ac.uk/aix502/11022011449.jpg
> 
>  The spinning char can seemingly be in any position when it crashes. It took 5 attempts that time to get to the beastie menu.

OK.. unfortunately not really much help except confirming that it is in the BIOS/loader somewhere..
>> Is there an update for the BIOS? Does this happen on other hardware?
> 
>  I suspected BIOS, that's why I was going to get a new motherboard. I've always had problems getting gptzfsboot working on this hardware and there are no more BIOS updates now. That's why I have ufs root, as it only worked intermitantly.
>  Then I wondered what the hell was going on in the loader that took >60s and seemingly touched every drive. I assumed it was FBSD that was tasting all the drives.

I believe the loader does look at the drives the BIOS presents to it, certainly at the very least it tries to find something to boot off :)

However, even if it is looking on every disk for partitions it should only take a second or so (unless one of the drives is broken I suppose).

I have seen BIOSen not boot reliably when external RAID cards are present.. Generally their quality is quite variable :(

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
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