I’m installing a new FreeBSD server, and want to mirror the root disks. According to the instructions in the Handbook and my own Absolute FreeBSD, it’s a simple process. The instructions are not valid for FreeBSD 9, however. It was late. I was tired. I tried anyway.
The first clue should have been that the disk devices now have different names. Rather than /dev/da0s1, they now look like /dev/da0p1. What difference does a letter make? Well, my test instance is virtualized. I took a snapshot and tried to follow the geom_mirror instructions, including updating /boot/loader.conf and /etc/fstab. My next boot failed with:
GEOM: mirror/gm0: corrupt or invalid GPT detected.
GEOM: mirror/gm0: GPT rejected -- may not be recoverable
Cue the familiar sinking feeling in my gut.
Reading the release notes tells me that the new installer writes GPT partitions. It’s about time this change was made; GPT has been used on non-x86 hardware for years now, and overcomes many of the limitations of MBR partitions.
But geom_mirror and GPT cannot coexist on whole disks. Both write to the last sector of the disk. If you follow the mirroring instructions in the Handbook, blithely ignoring the fact that the device names have changed, you overwrite the GPT.
Oops. I’d already installed a bunch of software on this machine. I’d rather not redo that. Let’s see how to recover.
Fortunately, recovery is fairly easy. Boot the installation CD, but rather than installing, choose the live system. You’ll get a command prompt.
Now look at your disk’s GPT.
# gpart show
=> 34 209715133 da0 GPT (100G) [CORRUPT]
...
The scary bit is the last word. You can’t boot a corrupt disk. Try to recover the GPT.
# gpart recover da0
da0 recovered
#
Another gpart show should show the word CORRUPT is missing.
With the FreeBSD 9 installer, the disk’s root filesystem is /dev/da0p2.
# mount /dev/da0p2 /media
# cd /media/etc
# cp fstab-old fstab
# cd /media/boot
# vi loader.conf
Remove the geom_mirror_load=YES line from loader.conf.
Theoretically, you’ve recovered. Reboot the live CD, boot onto the hard disk. If you were following the instructions, this error should be recoverable.
I must still figure out how to mirror my boot disk correctly, but this at least got the system back up.
I feel a demarcation dispute coming on. What you wrote about is the type of thing I’d do while installing.
It would have unquestionably have been better to do during the install. I didn’t have the second hard drive in the machine when I installed, however. And I’ve mirrored / on so many boxes that it wasn’t a big deal until now…
This is certainly a great post, surely i would like to read more about this topic.