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

[Reginald Beardsley]

--- On Sun, 1/27/13, Sašo Kiselkov <skiselkov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Sašo Kiselkov <skiselkov.ml at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Booting from a drive detached from a ZFS mirrored root pool
> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> Date: Sunday, January 27, 2013, 5:38 AM
> On 01/27/2013 01:04 AM, Reginald
> Beardsley wrote:
> > Because I can't boot from 3 TB drives, I'm trying to
> sort out plan B for configuring my N40L. 
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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"?
> > 
> > I don't need maximal uptime.  What I need is easy
> recovery from failure w/o losing data from the RAIDZ pool.
> 
> I thought you were planning to partition the 3TB drives and
> reserve a
> small (50GB?) portion at the start that would be used a the
> root pool.
> Is that not working?
>

It apparently can't be done w/ 3 TB disk.  The installer won't allow installing w/o stomping on the existing label. Oracle's documentation states that it is not possible to boot 10 or 11 from disks over 2 TB.

So I'm debating partitions on 4x2 TB disk or a separate root pool disk.  I'm leaning in the 4x2 direction at the moment as that should cover what I really need for the next 2-3 years. I have such high confidence that will work, I'll probably order a single 2 TB disk to test it.   I'm very burned out on chasing down compatibility issues and winding up w/ expensive shelfware.

I burned up the whole day yesterday trying to get 151a7 to play nice w/ a 3 TB Toshiba USB drive.  It works, but not nice enough to be usable.  But it's an improvement.  I couldn't get 151a5 to create a pool at all.  So it wound up on the shelf for 6 months.

Have Fun!
Reg