Re: Seeing the dreaded "ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable" on 9.0-CURRENT

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:08 PM, John Baldwin <jhb_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 25 February 2010 12:58:13 pm Chris wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:06 AM, John Baldwin <jhb_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > On Wednesday 24 February 2010 10:12:25 pm Chris wrote:
>> >> So it sounds like somehow my system is trying to use the old boot2
>> >> method when I don't hit F12. I'm guessing the difference is due to how
>> >> the hard drive is getting presented to the boot loader by the BIOS.
>> >> How can I get rid of the legacy boot system and use only the ZFS
>> >> bootloader?
>> >
>> > Does F12 enable PXE booting or some such?
>>
>> The only options I have when I press F12 are to either boot from my
>> hard drive or to boot from my optical drive. Is there
>> any way to more verbosely see what is happening at the bootloader level?
>
> No.  So it sounds like F12 pops up some sort of boot menu, and that in the
> broken case you just let the machine boot off of the disk normally?

Right. Upon powering on, to get the system to boot normally, I hit the
F12 key which brings up a box that lets me choose either my hard disk
or my optical drive to boot. When I do not hit F12, I get the LBA
errors and the "ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable" error
shown in previous posts to this thread. If I boot into the non-F12
broken state and leave the system alone, it appears to try and boot
twice and gets the same LBA errors and the same ZFS error.

Again, if I install FreeBSD off an installation CD and use sysinstall
to install a typical UFS-based system it boots without any trouble at
all, F12 or not, leading me to believe that there's some sort of
difference between the plain bootloader and the ZFS-enabled bootloader
with respect to the way they interact with the BIOS.

Another oddity I noticed is that if I change the SATA mode in the BIOS
to "IDE Native" mode, the hard drive activity light stays on, even
when the system is booted and is sitting idle. If I change it to
"AHCI", I do not see this. I doubt this has any relation to ZFS, but
it was just an interesting observation.