[OmniOS-discuss] Problem with a couple of drives and omnios

[Frank Pittel]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 02:59:11PM -0400, Dan McDonald wrote:
> 
> > On Mar 14, 2015, at 3:09 PM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > I thought at first that something happened to my boot drives so I unplugged my 2TB drives and tried to boot from dvd to reinstall. I didn't hit
> > the button for the boot menu fast enough and ended up booting from disk. To my surprise the OS booted fine. I then plugged in the 2TB zones and
> > tried booting again. To make a long story short I found that the two drives for one of the pools were causing the problem. I've tried deleting the
> > zpools, removing partitions and even used dd to overwrite the MBR on the drives. No luck with any of the attempts. Have I damaged the drives in
> > some wierd way or done something to keep them from working with omnios?
> 
> So wait, removing one of your DATA pools makes this machine boot okay?  Did you check your zpool status after booting?  You may have been able to export the (disconnected) pool, then plug the drives back in, then reboot, and reimport the pool.
> 
> The corrupted "unix" at the end of platform/i86pc/... suggests possible a corrupt menu.lst.  Did you check with grub what the menu entry was actually passing along?  You can do that with the 'e' key over your specific boot menu choice.
> 
> Dan

When I remove one of the DATA pools the machine will boot. I've tried exporting the pool and it doesn't help. While the pool drives are unplugged
I can boot the machine without issue. I've then run "devfsadm -C" to remove device entries.  Even then the machine won't boot with the drive
connected. After the OS is booted I can plug the drives in. They aren't visible via format until I run devfsadm again. The errors got me to
thinking there was something in the boot sector that was confusing my oldish MB and the MB was trying to boot off of one of those drives I used dd
to overwrite the MBR with no success. I'm thinking of just going and using dd to write /dev/zero over the entire drives. There's nothing on those
drives that I care about since I was just using them to play with different permutations of zfs and zones. Things like mounting filesystems in
zones, etc.

Frank