Aligning MBR for ZFS boot help

[Cody Ritts]

I have never seen ANY reference to installing the /boot/zfsboot with 
gpart.  And if you look at how that ZFS boot code is installed, it is 
not like any of the other boot codes that gpart does install.  I dont 
even know how you would construct the syntax.  the bootcode arguments 
seem to be GPT and MBR specific, and mutually exclusive.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition#A_Installing_FreeBSD_to_the_ZFS_filesystem

I know that if I leave either of those dd commands out when installing, 
the system will not boot.  If I leave out the ada0s1 boot code, the 
system just hangs after mbr is run.  If I leave out the ada0s1a boot 
code, I get an error. (I dont remember what)

Ultimately, I am aligned and running so I am happy enough. 32MB is an 
acceptable loss.  I am burnt out on struggling with the bootloader.  I 
have been doing it in various ways for DAYS now trying to just figure 
out ZFS boot at all.  There are a lot of broken (or old?) ZFS boot 
howtos that made the process more difficult than it should be for me 
because I wasnt luck enough to stumble onto the "correct" articles right 
off the bat.  I do everything the hard way :)

Thanks

Cody

On 3/10/13 12:51 PM, Warren Block wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Mar 2013, Cody Ritts wrote:
>
>> Yeah, just for clarity:
>>
>>> root at lightning# gpart show da0s1
>>> =>       0  39068064  da0s1  BSD  (18G)
>>>           0        32         - free -  (16k)
>>>          32  39067648      1  freebsd-zfs  (18G)
>>>    39067680       384         - free -  (192k)
>>
>> and
>>
>>> dd if=/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/da0s1 count=1
>>> dd if=/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/da0s1a skip=1 seek=1024
>>
>> will not boot.
>
> But is that putting zfsboot in the right place?  Try installing zfsboot
> with gpart.
>