At work I have a 10.3/AMD64 system that currently has root on a UFS2 file system on a single disk, and I'd like to ultimately move it to ZFS on mirrored disks. However, as I'd like to use the existing disk as one of the two mirror disks, my first step was to clone the contents of the current disk to a temporary drive (still UFS2), boot from that drive, then use the original system disk and another to create the mirror.
To create the temporary disk, I mostly followed the instructions for GPT disks on Warren Block's Disk Setup On FreeBSD site, only adapting it to my existing disk partitions and dev node names. To copy the existing data, I opted for
The problem comes when trying to boot from the new, temporary disk after moving the content over. Initially, everything seems to be working, but then it hangs right before I would normally see ZFS related messages on the console. The system has two ZFS pools on it already, most notably /home, which makes me suspect that it's somehow related to ZFS and the existing pools. Do they need to be exported before trying to boot from the new disk?
I also tried to replicate the problem in a VM, without success, even when not exporting the pools. However, there's more than a few variables that are different between the VM and the real physical system (e.g. no block size mismatch, I think the existing system disk is MBR and not GPT, whereas in the VM they were both GPT, etc.), so that doesn't surprise me. Any idea on where to go from here, or how to troubleshoot?
To create the temporary disk, I mostly followed the instructions for GPT disks on Warren Block's Disk Setup On FreeBSD site, only adapting it to my existing disk partitions and dev node names. To copy the existing data, I opted for
rsync
over dump
/ restore
, as UFS2 now uses 32 KB blocks by default instead of the legacy 16 KB blocks on the existing system drive, and I wasn't sure if that would cause issues or not. As such, the temporary disk shows slightly larger usage in df
due to more wasted space.The problem comes when trying to boot from the new, temporary disk after moving the content over. Initially, everything seems to be working, but then it hangs right before I would normally see ZFS related messages on the console. The system has two ZFS pools on it already, most notably /home, which makes me suspect that it's somehow related to ZFS and the existing pools. Do they need to be exported before trying to boot from the new disk?
I also tried to replicate the problem in a VM, without success, even when not exporting the pools. However, there's more than a few variables that are different between the VM and the real physical system (e.g. no block size mismatch, I think the existing system disk is MBR and not GPT, whereas in the VM they were both GPT, etc.), so that doesn't surprise me. Any idea on where to go from here, or how to troubleshoot?