[illumos-gate] 17303 rmvolmgr: dprintf() cleanup -- Hans Rosenfeld <rosenfeld⊙gho>

hi. I had questions about my recent smartos installation, and the site lists #smartos and #illumos channels for real time chat, but the former is vacant (although the topic is set)

basically my issue is that I installed it on one of 2 nvme drives, including a bootable zfs partition, but from the bios menu it's not recognizing the drive as bootable

I also tried using an omnios cd to get a loader menu, and I can see the devices correctly with lsdev, but I don't know how to manually boot into it

does anybody have an ideas?

are you using UEFI?

yes. the efi-loader command returns "2.80"

you could try dropping into the uefi shell

eh, i'm discovering that it's historical normal to boot smartos via usb key or network/pxe boot

and trying different 'drives' (it's like DOS, so you have fs0: fs1: etc)

and see if it can see it

you mean from the bios menu?

UEFI often inclues a uefi shell

i recall that as an option. i had no idea how to use it

one of the problems is that despite the UEFI spec being clear on certain things, certain vendors have decided to deviate from it for dubious 'value add' features... which includes things like booting

marino you installed smartos and are rebooting without the usb key or the installer did not work?

it's like command.com

but instead of A:, B: etc you have fs0: fs1: etc

some vendors e.g. supermicro do some non-standard "value add" (of dubious value) things to UEFI booting

where you have to jump through some extra hoops before it'll show you additional disks w/ bootable UEFI system partitions

neirac_: so it's a long story. I burned a usb key and it was a slick installer. I answered a few questions and turned away, and the box had rebooted to the other disk. I couldn't get the usb key to work right again, so I burned a ISO on a CD. I did successfully install it via ISO. but there's no loader menu option on that iso.

I had an omnios disk that does that loader menu and I can see the zfs devices but I'm stuck there

but from what I'm reading -- smartos doesn't just "boot"

marino oh ok, in smartos if you want to boot from disks you need to use piadm

let me google that -- never heard of it

if you don't want to use the usb anymore, you use piadm. but first you need to be able to login to your smartos box

marino docs.smartos.org/remotely-upgrading-a-usb-key-based-deployment

marino smartos.org/man/8/piadm

so I walked into this a bit ignorant

for the record, during the install I did set up the zfs pool to be bootable (something piadm supposedly does)

so I have a chicken-egg problem? I need to get this disk booted so I can use piadm?

i might try reburning that usb key and see if that helps

marino booting from the usbkey should work as long as your machine boot order usb is first, then the rest of devices.

which it is. for some reason the key stopped being recognized and the bios would skip it

which is why I switched to the iso which has a completely different interface

yeah, I just reburned it and the usb key is getting skipped. I used rufus on windows with the ".usb" image. it worked before. not sure what's changed.

okay, I burned the USB key again with linux (dd command) and now I can boot into smartos

marino great!

i'm trying to figure this piadm out to see if I can avoid the usb key. i haven't done so yet

i think my problem is that when I manually created the zones zpool I didn't specify the -B option which is why the bios isn't seeing it

but piadm list shows zones/boot as bootable so I don't know

i'll probably have to complete reinstall to create "zones" zpool with -B option

wow, it happened again. I rebooted the box and now the USB key is skipped again.

ah, disregard. I removed earlier! doh.

yeah, it's still working

it's not allowing me to re-install. the option is gone. i guess it sees a valid zones zpool and drops that option from the menu

marino If this server does not have any important data (this process will DESTROY all the data on the disks), and you understand that you will lose all your data, drop to a shell and type sdc-factory-reset, reboot and you will able to reinstall.

cool. to confirm, it's only going to destroy disks of the "zones" zpool (which is a single M2 drive for me)

i can't see how it could affect the other drive but doesn't hurt to ask

it's "sdc-factoryreset". So that worked until the point I created the zones zpool. it said it already existed and skipped it (meaning my change to support UEFI was skipped)

maybe it needed the -f flag for the zpool create command

nope. I think I went the wrong path. I had put "media" for the install and later it says it didn't make it bootable because it couldn't find install media, so I'll try again with "latest"

yep, it required "latest" to work

it's working now. Bios recognizes the drive and I can set it to boot directly without the usb key

marino that's great