[SunHELP] ZFS recovery

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:16:58AM -0400, Neurodancer wrote:
> On 17 Jun 2014, at 10:57 AM, microcode at zoho.com wrote:
> 
> >> This is a Dell T105 and the only setting is to turn SATA on or off.
> > 
> > Hmm, ok.
> 
> I should have explained: only setting for SATA control.

Understood.

> 
> > You should be able to boot an installer disk and boot your installed system
> > from the installer. It would be better to have someone nearby walk you
> > through this. I've done it a bunch of times and it is simple, but not simple
> > to talk about.
> 
> Yeah... I'll try to work it out. Most of my machines are so reliable I
> rarely get to exercise any recovery skills.

If you can't, I'll try to find my notes. There are are a lot of people
(everyone on the list?) who know more than me about this stuff but since
nobody answered I didn't want you to think it was futile. I believe you will
get your system back.

> > grub normally doesn't install on both drives of a root mirror. One thing you
> > should do when you get your system back is installgrub on both drives. Then
> > again, if you can't select boot order with your BIOS this might not help.
> 
> I can select boot order... and I did try booting from each drive.

Understood. What I mean is the S10 install doesn't (or did not) installgrub
on both drives, often. So if grub gets affected on one drive you can't
boot. I got in the habit of installing grub on both sides of the mirror, and
then I tested by switching the BIOS boot order and it works. You can fix
this after your system is booting again.

> 
> > I think your system is probably fine, I don't know why you lost your
> > bootability. But this sometimes happens on earlier S10. There used to be a
> > bunch of disk driver issues that affected SATA drives.
> 
> ...and of course, if I had a UPS on them it wouldn't have happened. I'm in
> that situation where it seems like everything is breaking all at once, and
> repair or replacement is outrunning my cash flow quite a bit. 

Yeah, believe me I know the feeling. I have a fresh S10 install on a box
with a dead/maimed PSU, I have a UPS with a dead battery, and another dead
UPS.

> Thanks for the notes. I'm going to see if I can boot the system from DVD
> and fix it.  

Good luck. I think it will be ok.