Reinstalling boot blocks on a ZFS-only system

[Chris Ross]

On May 12, 2013, at 23:17 , Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:20:26PM -0400, Chris Ross wrote:
>> In the past, I've found I've been unable to install all of the bootblocks if I
>> boot from the ZFS root.  When booting from a cd, the basic:
>> 
>> 	gpart bootcode -p ${bootdir}/zfsboot ${disk}
>> 	dd if=${bootdir}zfsloader of=/dev/${disk}a bs=512 oseek=1024 conv=notrunc,sync
>> 
>> works.  But, if I boot from ZFS, then I can't dd anything into the front of the 
>> drives.  Right now, the problem after booting from the CD, is trying to mount
>> a read/write filesystem (mfs, or the like) so that I can scp the bootblocks onto the
>> system and install them.  But, I eventually found the command I'd lost. so I 
>> think I'm alright.  Thanks...
> 
> What does "unable to install" mean?  What output/error do you get?  I am
> going to assume you get EPERM (Operation not permitted), which would be
> caused by GEOM's "preventive foot-shooting" (keep reading).
> 
> Is there some reason you're sticking with the MBR scheme instead of GPT?

I apologize for all of the noise on the list.  I failed to mention the important detail,
which is that I'm working on a sparc64 system, so it's all VTOC8, not MBR nor
GPT.

But as noted, I was able to mount an MBR an accomplish what I'd intended
when booting from a CD-R.  Thanks.

                  - Chris