Booting from an aribrary disk in ZFS RAIDZ on 8.x

[Paul Kraus]

On Mar 5, 2013, at 1:44 PM, Doug Poland <doug at polands.org> wrote:

> I'm running ZFS filesystem ver 3, storage pool ver 14, on 8-STABLE
> amd64. The kernel build is rather dated from around Feb 2010.
> 
> I have 6 disks in a RAIDZ configuration.  All disks were sliced
> the same with gpart (da(n)p1,p2,p3) with bootcode written to index 1,
> swap on index 2 and freebsd-zfs on index 3.
> 
> Given this configuration, I should be able to boot from any of the 6
> disks in the RAIDZ.  If this is a true statement, how do I make that
> happen from the loader prompt?

Boot in terms of root FS or in terms of boot loader ? 

The boot loader would be set in your BIOS (which physical drive you read for that).

/<root> comes from the zpool/zfs dataset once the boot loader loads enough code to find and mount the filesystem. That comes from all the drives in the zpool.

--
Paul Kraus
Deputy Technical Director, LoneStarCon 3
Sound Coordinator, Schenectady Light Opera Company