Removing all ZFS support from boot process

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 2/10/11 4:13 PM, Mark Powell wrote:
> Hi,
>   FreeBSD 8.1 r218475.
>   I have a raidz2 with 6x2TB devices; 3x2tb HDD and 3 stripes of 2x1TB HDD.
>   I have ufs / on USB flash.
>   After boot0 starts and the USB boots it displays Drive C: is disk0
> etc. for each drive. Then I can hear all the drives making noises.
> Sounds like the devices are being tasted, with the spinning char. This
> goes on for sometime. Often the machine hangs solid and I have to reset.
> It can take 3 or 4 attempts before the OS boots. I can tell it's hung by
> pressing the caps lock key. If the capslock light doesn't work I hit
> reset and cross my fingers.
>   It's been like this for as long as I can remember (i.e. many different
> source trees).
>   How can I fix this?
>   I thought it might be a BIOS fault and not FBSD, so I was considering
> a new motherboard. However, if I have ufs / can't I stop all this
> tasting/zfs nonsense at boot and let the kernel do it all later and
> therefore not susceptible to any possible BIOS faults?
>   I tried to rebuild with:
> 
> LOADER_ZFS_SUPPORT=no
> 
> in make.conf, but it seems to make no difference.
>   Any ideas?
>   Thanks.
> 


Hi Mark,


AFAIK (and people will correct me if I'm wrong), there is no ZFS support
whatsoever at boot unless you've asked zfs_load="YES" in your
loader.conf and installed the zfs bootcode.

You say you have a raidz2 so I take it your server was working before ?
The question I'm asking here is: before what ?

Did you upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1 ?


It may not be the best piece of advice you'll receive but I would try
the following:

1/ a verbose boot, you never know.
2/ unplug a disk, try to boot, rinse/repeat until it works, to identify
a potentially *very* faulty drive.