FreeBSD 8.4 Boot failure

[Tyler Sweet]

Well, I wasn't able to continue troubleshooting. I took the
opportunity that the server was already down to upgrade the BIOS. HP
kindly does not provide any checks or warnings letting you know that
you need to do a stepped upgrade, so the server is bricked. *sigh*. So
this likely won't get investigated more. I'll be setting up a new
server and attempting to import the zpools there.

Thank for your advice anyhow! If this happens again on another server,
I'll see about trying more things.


On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 3:46 AM, Tyler Sweet <tyler at tsweet.net> wrote:
> Luckily, in this case, I had set a cron job long, long ago to do daily
> snapshots. So I have a snapshot from before the upgrade - There are
> indeed two different loaders. The newer one matches "zfs" when
> grepped, the older one does not... But, since it was working before, I
> restored the older loader and tried to boot again. No dice - it still
> sticks at that screen where all I see is "/" in the upper left.
>
> I also tried putting the older zfsboot and zfsloader back in place
> (with the old loader) to try and get a different error - still no
> dice. I'm still stuck wondering if that screen is from FreeBSD
> attempting to boot, or from the BIOS - but nothing changed for
> booting, as far as I know. I'll poke through the BIOS more tomorrow as
> well to see if some option got reset during a power-off.
>
> I'll get a more thorough look at what all changed in /boot tomorrow
> too, and get a list of all the files. It's almost 4am here and I have
> to work tomorrow :) (well, today I suppose). I'll also check to see if
> I can find anything about if zfs boot works differently in 8.4 vs 8.3
> and older, as I may not have rebooted after the final "freebsd-update
> install" command (I *think* I did, but my memory gets fuzzy).
>
> Thanks for the input! I hope you have a good morning, and I'll let you
> know tomorrow/later today with anything new and interesting I find :)
>
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 1:45 AM, Terje Elde <terje at elde.net> wrote:
>> On 25. sep. 2013, at 06:59, Tyler Sweet <tyler at tsweet.net> wrote:
>>> I tried reinstalling the boot blocks from both
>>> the fixit live filesystem and also mounting zroot and using the files
>>> there in case they were different.
>>
>> Disclaimer: I haven't gotten (enough) morning-coffee yet, but...
>>
>> Disclaimer 2: at times tracking how zfs-booting is done in the different versions can be a bit tricky. This is a moving target, and I've lost track of the 8-branch.
>>
>> That said, assuming you have the correct bootcode (gptzfsboot), here's what might have happened:
>>
>> You installed 8.2, with a loader supporting zfs. Then you upgraded your /boot-stuffs, and bootcode on disk (correctly), but got left with a loader without zfs support. Then tried to upgrade the bootcode, but you're still left with a loader not supporting zfs.
>>
>> If I recall correctly, then the zfs-bootcode for 9+ will use "zfsloader" (supporting zfs and built by default), while earlier versions depend on "loader" with zfs support (built without by default).
>>
>> If that's the case, you could dump LOADER_ZFS_SUPPORT into /etc/make.conf and rebuild/reinstall it, or install /boot/loader from the fixit (if it has zfs support in 8.4).
>>
>> That's my first thought at least... If that  doesn't fix it (remember backups of any files you replace or upgrade), it'd be interesting to see the output of:
>> ls -l /boot/*loader /boot/*boot
>> On the /boot you're using. Anything that didn't get built or installed?
>>
>> Also, did you snapshot your zfs before upgrading? Could be a working /boot/loader there, which might be the easiest way to get the system up, before rebuilding with ZFS-capable loader... if I'm right, which isn't a given (ref disclaimers).
>>
>> Terje
>>