Trying to boot from a zfs external disk

[Fabian Keil]

Eduardo Lemos de Sa <eduardo.lemosdesa at gmail.com> wrote:

> I installed FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE in a internal hard disk (named, that
> time, as ada0) in a zpool called zeeroot. Now, I move this hard disk to
> a case (so, it is a external drive now) and it is recognized as da0.
> When I tried to boot it, the process start normally but stopped at the
> moment to mount partitions. Later, I used to solve problems like this
> (in UFS/UFS2 file systems) booting in a live system (memory stick or CD)
> and editing /etc/fstab, renaming devices. But now, there is only in
> my /etc/fstab:
> 
> # Device        Mountpoint    FStype    Options        Dump    Pass#
> #/dev/ada0p2        none    swap    sw        0    0
> md99                    none    swap    sw,file=/usr/swap0,late 0       0
> 
> I read https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide and
> https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/ZFS, further FreeBSD Handbook.
> 
> In the two first, there is no mention about problems in boot stage using
> zfs.
> 
> Further, I tried to find files under /etc/ called zfs.conf or zpool.conf
> or other mentions to ada0 (grep -r -i ada0 *): nothing.

In case of ZFS the root pool is specified in /boot/loader.conf
with a line like:
vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:tank"

ZFS is supposed to figure out the location of the disk(s) itself.

> Thus, I do not how can solve this mount booting problem. Please, could
> you give some hint about?

This bug could explain why booting fails when you use an external disk:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208882

Fabian
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