ZFS Solaris: Cannot find the pool label

Hi,

I have a small sized NAS with an on-board LSI SAS2308 controller in IR mode, but with drives presented directly. Due to space constraints I’m booting of those drives, which host a RAID-Z pool. A known problem with the on-board controller is that it is getting to hot and over time it dies slowly with lots of controller resets. This happened before, but I had a spare MB.

Over the weekend this started to happen with my last spare MB. I still had a PCIe version of SAS2308 and plugged that with the drives into a newer machine, because it doesn’t fit in the existing case.

The boot loader is started but it stops with Solaris: Cannot find the boot label for zroot

When I add an extra drive on a SATA port and install FreeBSD ( same version 13-stable of a couple of days ago ) I can import the pool ok and scrub it. No errors found, but booting stil fails the same way even when I physically disconnect the extra drive.

There are differences:

- PCIe controller runs in IT mode. Reported drive size in blocks is identical. Firmware is 17.0. based when the on-board had 20.0 (latest) and ran IR in pass-thru.
- hardware is different

Before I start upgrading firmware, I would like to investigate a bit more. (This is my last controller and I don’t want to brick it with newer firmware)

Which label is ZFS complaining about and where is it located?

Peter