Re: Lockdown adaX numbers to allow booting ?

Kurt Jaeger writes:

> The problem is that if all 10 disks are connected, the system
> looses track from where it should boot and fails to boot (serial boot 
> log):
> 
> Consoles: internal video/keyboard  serial port
> BTX loader 1.00  BTX version is 1.02
> Consoles: internal video/keyboard  serial port
> BIOS drive C: is disk0
> BIOS drive D: is disk1
> BIOS drive E: is disk2
> BIOS drive F: is disk3
> BIOS drive G: is disk4
> BIOS drive H: is disk5
> BIOS drive I: is disk6
> BIOS drive J: is disk7
> BIOS drive K: is disk8
> BIOS drive L: is disk9
> //
> [...]
> The solution right now is this to unplug all disks of the 'bck' pool,
> reboot, and re-insert the data disks after the boot is finished.
> [...]
> No gpart on the bck pool, raw drives.


This sounds very much like my experience:

   2018-11-29, Boot loader stuck after first stage upgrading 11.2 to 
12.0-RC2
     
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2018-November/090129.html
     
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2018-December/090159.html

I now have three SuperMicro machines which are unable to boot after
upgrading 11.2 to 12.0. After unsuccessfully fiddling with boot loaders,
I have reverted two back to 11.2 (which boots and works fine again),
and the third one is now at 12.0 but needs the boot hack as described
by Kurt, i.e. pull out half the disks (of the 'data' pool), boot the
system, plug the disks back in and zfs mount the remaining pool.

Considering that the 11.2 boots and works fine on these machines,
I consider it a btx loader failure and not a BIOS issue.

What is common with these three machines is that they have one pool
on raw devices for historical reasons (not on gpt partitions).
My guess is that the new loader gets confused by these raw disks.

   Mark