ufs to zfs

[jd1008]

The OP says he does have an external drive which the bios does not allow 
booting from.
He can he back up  (tar) the current system that is UFS based to the 
external drive,
clobber the ufs partition by simply formatting it as a ZFS partition, 
and at some
point, (after appropriate admin of zfs partition), tar the system back 
into the zfs partition.
Is this "doable"? (Pardon the bad "english").


On 10/24/2016 12:53 AM, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 23/10/2016 12:08, Stari Karp wrote:
>> The file system on my FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE is UFS which I have all the
>> time. I like to have ZFS but I do not like to reformat HD and installed
>> everything again.
>> The OS is installed on iMac and I use rEFIt for dual boot with OSX. I
>> have also external HD which cannot be use for boot.
>> Is it any chance to convert to ZFS file system, please?
> You can't convert UFS to ZFS in-place.  You need at least an empty
> partition big enough to contain your entire system.  You can then create
> a new zpool from it, import the new zpool to a relocated root by 'zpool
> import -R /somedir';  create appropriate ZFSes within it and then copy
> over all the content from your system using eg. tar(1) or cpio(1).  Then
> you'll need to fix up your boot settings so your system will boot from
> the zpool, which I don't know offhand how to do on a system that boots
> using EFI.
>
> 	Cheers,
>
> 	Matthew
>