zfs - reinstall - totally lost!

Blueprint said:
Hi Phoenix, im new to freebsd and this community. I want to thank you for your good zfs tips in other threads. It has helped me alot with my setup.

Coming from an AIX background we always run at least 2 volume groups so thats what I did with my freebsd setup. Theres so much benifit to being able to export your data pool/vg while keeping the working system in tact.

I have a mirrored zroot pool and a raidz zstorage pool. I dont see the benifits of still running some of the system filesystems on ufs. If i want to reinstall my OS, ill just export my zstorage pool, reboot into fixit and import the zroot pool and change the root dataset mountpoint (which will cascade down to the rest). Then create new datasets and proceed to do a normal install as per the wiki.

I think if our concern is pool corruption it will be more from some hardware malfunction then doing a new OS install.
Click to expand...

The reason I keep a UFS partition around is that I started with ZFS in the 7.0-STABLE days. :) Back before you could boot into ZFS, and before the "/boot on UFS" hacks appeared. I initially started with just / on UFS (/bin, /lib, /sbin, etc) with everything else in ZFS (/usr, /var, /tmp, /home, etc). But, we ran into a few bumps that required booting to single-user mode to fix ... and it's very hard to do that when half the OS is inaccessible in ZFS. :)

I'll consider moving over to all-ZFS once there are fixit CDs and LiveCDs that support ZFS repairs. ;) And once I have more experience with fixing broken ZFS pools and filesystems.

However, once I do move to an all-ZFS system, I will keep two pools: one for the OS (/ and /usr) and one for everything else (/usr/local, /home, /var, /tmp, and so on). The former will be a mirrored pool (2 disks), the latter will be some form of raidz
 
fixit disk and dvd does support zfs.... you just need to
Code: 
# mkdir /boot/zfs
# ln -s /dist/boot/kernel /boot/kernel
# ln -s /dist/lib /lib
# kldload zfs

I wrote this from my memory, so there might be minor bugs :D but you get the idea.
 
In a fixit CD yesterday, I had to preface
paths with /dev (mount ... /dev). Just in
case someone is writing down the post above
and it does not work...
(was fstab stuff though, not zfs )
 
Uhhh, interesting... does this mean, that people who use gpt, will have to repartition their drives?

Well, I fall out of this category... since I started using zfs I don't use gpt on my HDD's
 
killasmurf86 said:
Uhhh, interesting... does this mean, that people who use gpt, will have to repartition their drives?
Click to expand...

i am really looking forward to an answer to your question since i am going to use gpt :)
 
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