[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing grub on a zfs mirror rpool

[Reginald Beardsley]

 Well, close, but not quite done :-(

I booted the single user shell from the install DVD, used "zpool status" to verify the disk names and then did "installgrub -m stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/????" for the 3 devices in the rpool mirror.

Did an "init 5" which flashed some message I couldn't read before it was gone. I then removed the DVD and it came up to the grub menu. I took the standard multi-user boot option, but it hung with an nVidia splash screen. I was able to shut it down cleanly by pressing the power button.

I rebooted via grub to single user mode. "zpool status" showed the root pool as corrupted which was not the case when I booted from the install DVD previously. I started a scrub and it crashed. I've rebooted single user and the scrub is running on the root pool.

This system has had an issue that if I did a scrub it would kernel panic, but after I booted it would finish the scrub with no issues. The symptom suggests a bad DIMM, but short of simply replacing them all or exhaustive substitution over many days no idea of how to fix that.

After the initial failure I scrubbed all the pools using the install DVD shell and all reported no errors. So I'm still hopeful that I'll recover OK. I've been extremely impressed by ZFS over the years.

Rather clearly I need to devote more time to my sys admin chores. Dual processor Z6x0 and Z8x0 systems have become quite cheap so I think I may get one of those and set up a RAIDZ configuration using 5 disks.

Thanks again,
Reg


     On Monday, February 22, 2021, 09:44:49 AM CST, Toomas Soome <tsoome at me.com> wrote:  
 
 


On 22. Feb 2021, at 17:38, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:
 

Toomas,

Thanks for the confirmation.

On the Z400 the device names get changed around in an odd fashion that I've never quite been able to sort out. I often find that the front panel USB connection will have a different number than the last time I plugged a flash drive into it a few minutes earlier. 

I manually mount the flash drives as I had issues with volfs. That was so long ago I don't remember the exact issue. I just shrugged and disabled it on Solaris 10. It or something similar is running on my Hipster instance, but it always fails.

When I did an" installgrub stage1 stage 2 /dev/rdsk/???" and it didn't boot I became rather nervous. My notes in the system admin log book never seem to have enough detail and it doesn't have an index. It's just a record of what I have done over a span of 10 years on 5-6 machines.



You need to pay attention also for MBR, you most likely do need -m.

The Z400 BIOS boot menu lets me select USB, optical disk or hard disk, but I've never found a way to specify which hard disk. To make it still more interesting, the same 3 disks in the same 3 trayless cage slots have appeared as c0d0, c0d1, c1d0, c1d1, c2d0, c6d0 all in a single day without my having moved them. Simply from one boot from the install DVD to the next. As a consequence "zpool import" would list members of the pool "unavailable" and report the pool as corrupted when it was not.

As I understand you, to make it boot reliably from the mirror pool in the s0 slices I should repeat the installgrub for each of the disks in the mirrored pool. Is that correct?



Yes. if your primary boot will die, you need to assign next mirror member as new boot disk from BIOS setup (or swap the disks), and then you want it to have boot blocks installed. Of course, if you have alternate media always available, you can use alternate media to fix your bootability.
rgds,toomas

Thanks,
Reg

     On Monday, February 22, 2021, 03:22:56 AM CST, Toomas Soome <tsoome at me.com> wrote:  
 
 

> On 21. Feb 2021, at 01:09, Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> My HP Z400 based Solaris 10 u8 system had some sort of disk system fault.  It has a 100 GB 3 way mirror in s0 for rpool and the rest of each  2 TB disk in s1 forming a RAIDZ1.
> 
> After reseating all the cables I was able to boot to a single user shell using the installation DVD and scrub both pools with no errors reported, though a small part of the rpool mirror was resilvered.
> 
> However, I can't get the system to boot from the hard drives. I've tried using installgrub but had no success.
> 
> What are the correct stage1 and stage2 files to use for a zfs mirrored root pool?  Should I install grub on all 3 disks?

the correct stage files should be /boot/grub/stage1 and /boot/grub/stage2. Normally yes, you want all boot pool member disks to be able to be used for boot.

rgds,
toomas


> 
> The presence of zfs_stage1_5 makes it very ambiguous.  I can find no explanation of what that is for.
> 
> I've continued to use u8 because I prefer using twm and I've never figured out how to make OI do that. This system does not have internet access and is set up for software development and scientific work.  All of the systems are connected to an 8 port KVM switch.
> 
> I use OI for my internet access and Windows 7 Pro and Debian 9.3 on a 3rd system to run electronics engineering codes which are not available for any other platforms.  I tried using VirtualBox for Windows on OI, but it was intolerably slow.
> 
> Reg
> 
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