I've borked my ZFS system upgrading to -STABLE

[Glen Barber]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Steve Bertrand <steve at ibctech.ca> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> In short, I've got a system with /boot on a USB thumb drive that I boot
> from, which then mounts root and the rest of the system from a 4-disk
> ZFS storage pool.
>
> However, during the upgrade, something didn't go quite right, and now
> when I boot, I end up with:
>
> /libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libc.so.7" not found required by sh
>
> ...at the "Enter full path of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh#" prompt.
>
> Hitting return repeats the cycle.
>
> Rebooting to the old kernel does not help, as it was the installworld
> that failed.
>

I've seen this before.  My situation was different, as I had just
installed the machine, finished a 'co' on the source tree and rebuilt
world/kernel.  Since there was nothing, production-wise, on the
machine, I thought nothing of it and reinstalled.  Had there been data
on the machine, I would have dug deeper.

> I can boot the box using alternate media, but I can't figure out the
> procedure to mount the ZFS pool into the filesystem.
>

Can you boot into single-user mode from the USB device?

> This box is a running-backup box, so I'm not overly concerned about the
> data, but I would like to learn how to properly get to the data if this
> situation arises in the future.
>
> Can someone provide some pointers on how to do this without destroying
> the pool?
>

Unfortunately, I haven't played with ZFS (because of lack of hardware
to run it on)... My reason for the post was to suggest single-user
mode, if you haven't already tried.

Also, to stop the repeated reboot, you could use /rescue/sh in place
of /bin/sh  (hopefully).


-- 
Glen Barber