[OpenIndiana-discuss] Booting from a drive detached from a ZFS mirrored root pool

[Jan Owoc]

Hi Reginald,

I was in a similar situation when building my home-NAS.

On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:
> If I stick the 250 GB disk that came w/ the system in the ODD slot and use that for the root pool w/ a 4x3 TB RAIDZ, what happens if my root pool disk fails?  ZFS keeps  a lot of state information in places I don't know about.

As far as I'm aware, assuming the HDDs don't lie about cache flushes,
the RAIDZ pool will always maintain internal consistency. As long as
your root disk isn't also the ZIL/SLOG, failure of the root disk
should not affect the RAIDZ pool residing on the remaining drives.

> My current plan B would be to use the eSATA port to mirror to an external SATA drive and then detach it.  Is it reasonable to expect that I could install the detached mirror drive in the system and boot from it or is there something on the disk that says "you can't do that"?

Brian asked the same question about a year ago, but didn't get an answer:
http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2012-February/007255.html

I suppose this could be tested on a virtual machine...

Cheers,
Jan