amd64/160801: zfsboot on 8.2-RELEASE fails to boot from root-on-zfs in MBR slice

[Camillo Särs]

Hi,

On 2011-09-19 15:02, John Baldwin wrote:
>> Install zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2, where the problem is fixed.
> 
> Can you test 8.2-stable?  The various fixes made to zfsboot in 9 were merged 
> to 8 after 8.2-release.

Unfortunately fixing this issue by installing zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2 was
a surprising amount of work, because of an incompatibility between the
9.0 USB installer GPT and the BIOS on this system.  It took quite a
while to recognize the root cause for that one.  I simply cannot boot
the system in question with the GPT pmbr used on the memstick of 9.0.
The BIOS locks completely.

I am very reluctant to risk breaking my currently running system, the
previous boot failure caused almost two weeks of downtime.

Does the 8.2-stable memstick image still use MBR?  If so, I could
conceivably try to copy the 9.0 zfsboot version to the 8.2-stable
memstick and test both.

Regards,
Camillo