Installing on external drive

[rmomota]

Hello, I want to change my system from BIOS boot to UEFI and from UFS to ZFS:
For that I'm trying to prepare a USB external drive with ZFS to boot from and transfer/restore my system into that external drive (in a USB SATA enclosure)
During disk preparation the system just reboots.
Here are the instructions I'm following:
$ gpart destroy -F da0
$ gpart create -s GPT da0
$ gpart add -t efi -s 512M -l efi da0
$ gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 8G -l swap0 da0
$ gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l zroot da0
$ zpool create \
-o ashift=12 \
-o autotrim=on \
-O compression=lz4 \
-O atime=off \
-O aclmode=passthrough \
-O aclinherit=passthrough \
-O xattr=sa \
-O normalization=formD \
-O mountpoint=none \
zroot /dev/gpt/zroot
$ zfs create -o mountpoint=none zroot/ROOT
$ zfs create -o mountpoint=/ zroot/ROOT/default <<<< reboots here
$ zpool set bootfs=zroot/ROOT/default zroot

after reboot the system gets in a sort of reboot loop if the USB disk is connected, probably when it zpool import

What am I doing wrong?

When I connect the USB disk and try to
$ zpool import zroot
it shows "no such file or directory: /dev/null" and reboots again

 

[loveydovey]

Because that's probably your current host's mountpoint, so you get a conflict. I think you need to use a different mount point for the installation - maybe change zroot to something else?

 

[MG]

Could it be that the USB SATA controller is underpowered due to the lz4 compression that demands too much controller resources? Thing with USB storage is that it's direct transfer without buffer. The disk has to do everything.

 

[rmomota]

seems to work if I
$ zfs create -o mountpoint=/mnt zroot/ROOT/default

it was probably a conflict

 

[SirDice]

Specify an altroot when creating the pool. So the mountpoints don't overlap with your install media. Same with zpool-import(8) ( -R <temproot> )