I finally solved this one. I changed to a spare identical motherboard (good thing I had one), with identical results, the computer stalled after identifying the 320GB hard drives. I was beginng to wonder if I needed to try another motherboard with a different SATA controller, but everything pointed to the drives beign corrupted somehow by the zpool command. As a last gasp effort, I destroyed that zpool and created another one, using slightly different device names, added "p0" to the end of each device:
# zpool create extpool raidz c2d0p0 c3d0p0 c4d0p0 c5d0p0 This ends up with the same zpool as the previous effort (se below message), and the computer will not stall during the POST, allowing me to reboot it. Whew! I don't know what was going on there, but it's fixed. Chris ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:17:29 -0400 From: "Chris Cantwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: ZFS raidz causes BIOS POST to fail To: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hello, I have a bizarre situation that I've never encountered before. I installed Nextenta 1.0.1 test3 on a AMD 939 motherboard. Two primary drives for the OS on a SiI3132 SATA (PCI Express) controller, and four additional 320GB SATA drives on the onboard nVidia nForce SATA/RAID controller, the onboard RAID was disabled. Nextenta recognizes all the drives as follows: c1t0d0 80GB SiI3132 controller c1t1d0 80GB c2d0 320GB c3d0 320GB c4d0 320GB c5d0 320GB The OS installs nicely on the two 80GB drives, reboots, and when you get to the console. zpool status shows the drives are mirrored, and working OK. I then create another zpool using the four 320GB drives: # zpool create extpool raidz c2d0 c3d0 c4d0 c5d0 # zfs create extpool/data # ln -s /extpool/data /data Again zpool status shows everything OK. To test the setup I copy the entire /usr directory to /data, everything looks good, no errors. I reboot the machine and the computer stalls during POST, right after the external drives are recognized by the BIOS. I try some different things with no success, but I eventually fixed it by attaching the drives to another SATA RAID controller (Highpoint RocketRAID 1740), and "initializing" the drives. I reattached the drives to the onboard nVidia SATA RAID controller, and the machine booted. I replicated the situation by booting back into Nexenta, recreating the zpool, and rebooting again. The machine stalled once more after recognizing the drives on the POST. Apparently ZFS has changed something on the 320GB drives the does not agree with the nVidia nForce SATA controller. The BIOS is reading some identification info from the drives, and the ZFS metadata on the drives is locking up the POST. Does anyone have a workaround for this situation, so I can boot the machine with the 320GB drives configured as raidz? Thanks, Chris ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 2 Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:58:28 -0700 From: Erast Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: ZFS raidz causes BIOS POST to fail To: Chris Cantwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Chris, it could be either that your mobo's BIOS doesn't like EFI labels and need to be upgraded, or make sure that c1 disks are first in the BIOS boot order. _______________________________________________ gnusol-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sonic.net/mailman/listinfo/gnusol-users
