> I have installed OS 08.05 onto a USB HD (WD Passport)
> plugged into a first HP notebook. It has worked very
> satisfactorily.
>
> Now I am going to use this USB HD with a second
> notebook (also HP, but different CPU and almost
> everything else). The GRUB boot screen shows the
> boot options installed on this USB HD. However, as
> soon as it moved into the second stage boot process,
> the machine would restart to show the boot screen
> again, and I was never able to boot into any of the
> boot options.
Most likely it rebooted because the physical device path
of the boot disk has changed, so that the kernel is unable
to access the root filesystem using the old physical device
path.
For a zfs boot / root, the fix would be to boot the new machine
into solaris failsafe and let it mount the root pool; this has the
side effect up updating the physical device paths in the zpool's
label on disk to the correct paths for the new system.
But I think the big problem is that OpenSolaris 2008.05 (unlike
SXCE) doesn't install a failsafe boot option. For opensolaris
you probably can update the zpool's label by booting the new
machine from the live cd, and importing the existing USB HDD
zpool.
Another problem would be swap slice used with OpenSolaris 2008.05.
This would need manual updates in the /etc/vfstab file,
whenever you use the disk on a different system. Note that
this problem does not exist on current SXCE releases with
ZFS boot/root, which have both swap and dump on zvols!
> Is there anyway to use a USB HD that was installed
> from a first machine, on a second machine?
Btw. booting different systems from a zfs boot/root using an
usb hdd should work much better with SXCE snv_95, with the
changes for
6704717 ZFS mirrored root doesn't live up to expectations
6710937 Boot failed information should be more friendly
These changes allow opening the zpool's devices for mounting
the zfs root filesystem by "devid", so that you don't have to
boot into failsafe mode any more, before the disk gets usable
on a new system!
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