[OpenIndiana-discuss] failsafe boot howto on older OpenIndiana system

[Reginald Beardsley]

I lost the disk on my OI_151a8 system.  The swap area was going bad.  So I booted from a 2017.10 Hipster DVD, imported the old drive and copied everything to another disk using  a USB <-> SATA adaptor.

The evolving nature of ZFS makes the traditional miniroot problematic.  If the ZFS implementation in the miniroot image is older than the version on disk, it won't help.

I've been underwhelmed by the recovery from a failed disk on Solaris 10 u8, however, I think much of the issue there was the HP Z400 BIOS. After migrating from 1 TB to 2 TB disks by replacing individual disks, when I removed the last 1 TB disk it would not boot until I had swapped the appropriate cables.  I have a peculiar setup, 3 disks with the root pool in a 3 way mirror in s0 and a RAIDZ1 export pool in s1.  Resilvering the RAIDZ1 disks was *very* slow. It would have been quicker to setup the root pool, create the export pool and then zfs receive the export pool image from the mirrored scratch pool where I'd put it before I started the migration.