[OpenIndiana-discuss] After locked up zpool scrub, BIOS not recognizing HDDs to boot

[Toomas Soome]

> On 25. Sep 2022, at 02:33, Carl Brewer <carl at bl.echidna.id.au> wrote:
> 
> 
> I have a ~3 year old PC, generic motherboard, OI hipster 'something', that last night, I had to force a reboot on, because a zpool scrub was jammed up and nothing would kill it.  The scrub was on a raidz pool, not the boot drives, so I figured it would probably be ok. I was wrong!


Assuming up to date system, this *may* indicate issue related to disk controller.


> 
> On reboot, the motherboard's BIOS wasn't seeing the drives as a boot option - it could see them (there's 5, 2 mirrored for zpool, and a raidz array of 3), but wouldn't see them as boot options. It was just jumping straight to the BIOS setup screen at boot-time. A quick poke around in the BIOS confirmed that the BIOS could, at least, see the 5 drives in the box. Then I had to get stuff running, so I didn't have the luxury of time to muck about too much with it.
> 
> I booted it off a USB drive and could zpool import them ok, so I copied off the stuff I needed, a couple of VirtualBox VM's, but now I'd like to recover the machine if possible. I have a Borg backup of the bits I needed too, so this wasn't a complete disaster!
> 
> Any hints for how to reinstall a boot environment onto an existing zfs mirror?  If I have to do a full reinstall onto it, that's not a total disaster, I got what I needed off it, but it would be interesting to do.  I haven't yet gone through the BIOS settings to be certain it's not some stupid BIOS default around UEFI or something, but I didn't change the BIOS myself, I suspect that it isn't the problem.
> 

With 3 years old, was it actually using UEFI or BIOS boot? If firmware does not recognize disk as bootable, it may suggest that FAT32 in ESP is damaged or for BIOS, MBR signature is bad or like. In any case, it should not require reinstall, bootadm install-bootloader -f might be enough.

If you still do want to reinstall, openindiana installer does provide option to use existing pool on very first screen (press F5). However, that option will leave some manual work for you (creating users etc).

rgds,
toomas