After BIOS-Upgrade, I can't (UEFI-) boot anymore

[Rainer Duffner]

> Am 18.11.2015 um 14:33 schrieb O'Connor, Kevin <KevinO'Connor at merseyfire.gov.uk>:
> 
> 
> 
> From the wiki
> 
> The boot process proceeds as follows:
> 
>    UEFI firmware runs at power up and searches for an OS loader in the EFI system partition. The path to the loader may be set by an EFI environment variable, with a default of /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.
> 
>        For FreeBSD, boot1.efi is installed as /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.
>        boot1.efifat is an image of such a FAT filesystem for use by bsdinstall 
>    boot1.efi locates the first partition with a type of freebsd-ufs, and from it loads loader.efi. (This may be a different disk than the one holding the EFI system partition.)
>    loader.efi loads and boots the kernel, as described in loader(8).
> 
> So my best guess is that something has been changed by the upgrades and boot1.efi  no longer knows the correct location of  /boot/loader.efi
> 
> You'll have to go digging in the EFI system partition to work out what has changed. (I assume you have done an automated install of the HP support DVD and upgraded the array controller and the HDD microcode etc.)
> 
> Kevin
> 




I’ve figured it out already (after sleeping a few hours and looking at it all morning.

The system contains an additional controller (H240, in JBOD mode) that hosts another 8 disks.
The first of these disks previously (and briefly) housed another FreeBSD installation, with the GPT etc. that comes with it.
Even though it was now part of a zpool, the labels etc. persisted. I had forgotten about this...
Upon the BIOS upgrade, the system suddenly started looking at this disk, too and tried to boot from it.

I had to offline the disk, remove the partitions and the GPT and online the disk again - and then it would boot again.