Help booting FreeBSD with a ZFS root filesystem

[krad]

2010/1/26 Steve Bertrand <steve at ibctech.ca>

> krad wrote:
> > 2010/1/26 Ross Penner <ross.penner at gmail.com>
> >
> >> That seems to have been the problem.
> >>
> >> Thanks for the help.
> >>
> >> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 5:29 PM, George Liaskos <geo.liaskos at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>> I had the same issue because i forgot to copy the zpool.cache under
> >>> /zroot/boot/zfs.
>
> > once you have generated the zpool.cache never never never export the boot
> > pool again. Exporting isnt the same as unmounting (a common
> misconception).
> > If you do export it the pool will become unbootable.
>
> Out of curiosity (because I had this problem a few weeks back), how does
> one move a bootable pool into another physical server in order to be
> able to see the pool as a 'data' set without exporting/importing, and
> then moving the pool back to the hardware that it normally boots from?
>
> Perhaps I was lucky when copying the cache back onto itself worked...
>
> Steve
>

with difficulty i suspect. You will probably have to specify an alternate
root and zpool.cache file. Then copy the cache file onto the zpool before
powering down, and NOT exporting.

If you don't use an alternate zpool.cache file I suspect you will get issues
as the test systems zpools will be referenced in there, and will cause a
pickle when you bring the broken system up.

Its probably best to use a non zfs based rescue system just to keep things
simpler.