SOLVED Replacing boot pool device

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi all,

I'm planning to replace my mirror of two USB thumbdrives with a single SSD. My plan is to add the SSD as the 3rd disk into the mirror vdev, then remove the two thumbdrives, then reboot.

Additionally I need an EFI boot partition and the bootloader files on that. No problem. Now my question:

Is there anything that relies on the particular disk layout the FreeNAS installer initially created? I.e. the size of the EFI partition (currently 260M).

Or could I just create slightly larger EFI and ZFS partitions, align them adequately, as long as EFI is p1 and ZFS is p2?

Thanks,
Patrick

 

[sretalla]

I'm planning to replace my mirror of two USB thumbdrives with a single SSD. My plan is to add the SSD as the 3rd disk into the mirror vdev, then remove the two thumbdrives, then reboot.

I can confirm that this "works", having done it some months back.

The problem with it (at least for me) was that my SSD is now not correctly aligned.

I will eventually get around to doing a reinstall/config restore to correct that, but you could probably save yourself the time and jump straight to that (assuming you care).

I can't comment on the EFI stuff.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

That is precisely my concern. If I create p1 and p2 properly aligned, will there be anything e.g. in the update process of FreeNAS that might hurt me later?

Patrick

 

[HoneyBadger]

Suggestion. If you're willing to consider a reboot, is there a possibility of backing up your configuration and doing a fresh install to the SSD?

You could even do the installation and configuration restore to the SSD on another machine, and just do a power-off swap later. Would let you keep your USB drives as a backup in case it doesn't work somehow.

 

[sretalla]

If I create p1 and p2 properly aligned, will there be anything e.g. in the update process of FreeNAS that might hurt me later?

In my understanding, you would be OK, since actions like upgrades work on the boot partition, creating ZFS snapshots between versions, but I have not interfered with the installer-created partitioning myself to be certain of it.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Looks good:

Code:

root@freenas-pmh:~ # gpart show ada5
=>	  40  61865904  ada5  GPT  (30G)
		40	  2008		- free -  (1.0M)
	  2048   1048576	 1  efi  (512M)
   1050624  60813312	 2  freebsd-zfs  (29G)
  61863936	  2008		- free -  (1.0M)

root@freenas-pmh:~ # zpool status freenas-boot
  pool: freenas-boot
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0 days 00:00:17 with 0 errors on Mon Oct 29 19:18:37 2018
config:

	NAME		STATE	 READ WRITE CKSUM
	freenas-boot  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
	  ada5p2	ONLINE	   0	 0	 0

errors: No known data errors

As for the fallback, @HoneyBadger suggested: I attached the new SSD to the mirror, shutdown the system, then pulled the two USB drives - so I could plug them back in just in case. Then after successful boot I detached them from the mirror.

Kind regards
Patrick