glabel existing boot drive?

[dave]

Is it possible for me to glabel my existing boot drive? I am trying to make changes to my zfs array, and when I add a new drive, it results in my boot drive being renumbered, and the system will not boot. Can I create a label for the entire boot drive? How would my fstab file have to change? Thanks!

 

[wblock@]

It should be pretty safe to glabel(8) a disk after it's been created. The last block of the drive will be overwritten, but it's probably not being used by anything else.

However, there's a safer way. Label the filesystems on the disk, and mount them by those labels. glabel is used to label the swap partition only, not the drive.
FreeBSD Labeled Filesystems

 

[dave]

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed to know. I labelled the partitions instead of the whole drive per instructions here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-glabel.html

And that worked fine for me. Now the system boots regardless of drive enumeration order. Going to use labels from now on!

 

[dave]

OK, it gets worse...

One of my drives actually failed while it was being replaced (during zpool replace process). If I boot the machine with it physically attached, then the machine freezes when I try to run any zpool commands. If I detach it, the drives renumber themselves and the pool cannot be loaded.

Is there any way that I can label the existing drives or force them to use particular dev numbers, or have I lost my entire pool due to drive re-numbering?

 

[wblock@]

That would depend on ZFS, I think. But I have not used ZFS.

 

[dave]

Follow-up here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=148615#post148615