booting HP ProLiant Gen8 MicroServer from 2x3TB Toshiba disks?

[Malcolm Herbert]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014, at 20:51, rene reckschwardt wrote:

i run some Proliant Server and all booting from internal SCSI,
SATA and

SAS DIsks. What type of Controller do you use? Do you use
Hardraid or

JBOD as Boot Disk?



Hi Rene - it appears to be an 'HP Smart Array B120i RAID
Support' controller but I am wanting to use it in JBOD mode so
I can get ZFS to do the magic instead ... I've got the BIOS set
to AHCI SATA mode and the SATA controller reports both disks
are present during POST.  The FreeBSD kernel can see both disks
during the install and presents these as ada0 and ada1



This evening I tried several different installations - turns
out that if I use the guided ZFS-on-root with either GPT or MBR
I get different issues (but boot fails).  If I do a guided UFS
install with GPT it fails (differently) and if I do a guided
install and manually change the layout to a 10GB root with MBR
layout I get a bootable system and a login: prompt.



I've captured the output of dmesg -
[1]http://mjch.net/pub/freebsd/mangala-dmesg.txt



I took video during each of the installs and I will run through
that tomorrow night and pluck out the relevant bits and
pieces.  In summary they are:



ZFS mirror root with 4K sectors, GPT partitioning: BTX
complains it doesn't know where it booted from and panics

ZFS mirror root with 4K sectors, MBR partitioning: white-on-red
"Illegal VpCode" crash and stack dump[1]

UFS guided install to ada0, default layout, GPT partitioning:
"gptboot: invalid backup GPT header" and a hard hang

UFS guided install to ada0, 10GB single partition, MBR
partitioning: valid install, gets to login:



so ... I am not sure exactly where to go from here ... I guess
I could try with different smaller drives and narrow things
down that way, but it's late and I'm fed up at the moment, so
that will have to wait ... :)



Thanks for the help though, I do appreciate it.



Regards,

Malcolm



[1] I won't transcribe this now, but I can re-generate it if
required ... if I remove the USB DVD drive and all other USB
devices from the host, it will get to this point and reboot
immediately ...



--
Malcolm Herbert
mjch at mjch.net

References

1. http://mjch.net/pub/freebsd/mangala-dmesg.txt