Solved Installation on UFS mirror OK but installer destroyed it?

[FreeBeer]

Hi all,

after I had that horrible bug with booting from a zroot pool on FreeBSD 10.1 I installed 10.3 on two USB-sticks.
Here is what I did:

1. Booted the ISO and chose shell.
2. I set up the two USB-sticks as a mirror. kldload geom_mirror, gmirror label root /dev/da0 /dev/da1 and so on. Then exit
3. Partitioning with GPT and a root partition. Everything OK
4. Finally reboot

By chance I saw that the mirror got destroyed. After the reboot I was dropped at that mount shell of course.

Why is that?

Thanks for hints,

FreeBeer

 

[wblock@]

GPT is not compatible with anything that keeps metadata at the end of the device, like a whole-disk mirror with gmirror(8). GPT keeps a secondary partition table at the end of the device, and that will overwrite the mirror metadata.

The safe way to use gmirror(8) is with MBR/bsdlabel partitioning. That is shown in the Handbook section: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-mirror.html.

 

[FreeBeer]

Thank you. I'll try that.

FrreeBeer

 

[FreeBeer]

Still the same. After the final step (Reboot system) I see that the sync of the disks and then the gmirror destroy root. Why is that?

FreeBeer

 

[wblock@]

A message about shutting down the mirror is not the same as the mirror being overwritten. If that's not what you mean, please post the exact message.

Otherwise, the mirror will be set up when it boots.

 

[FreeBeer]

I found it!

There was something missing in loader.conf:

geom_mirror_load="YES"

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-mirror.html
Section Troubleshooting

FreeBeer