Spinning wheel after upgrade to RC2 - zfs?

[cmcd01]

Failed boot after upgrade to RC2 - zfs?

After installing RC2, booting into OS X gets hung at the grey spinning wheel (under the apple before login screen).  RC1 had been running fine for a month.  And, after the upgrade not working, I managed to screwup the clean bootable backup I had, so now I'm at a loss as I don't seem to have an OS X installation to boot into - though I can boot into XP.

The dual-boot disk is MBR: 
  . disk3s1 - NTFS XPpro boot drive
  . disk3s2 - HFS+ OS X boot drive (vanilla, retail 10.5.7)

I have 4 other disks, most notably:
  . disk2s1 - HFS+ superduper backup of OS X boot drive
  . disk2s2 - OS X install disk

Steps:
 1. installed RC2-640 via installer while running from disk3s2 to disk3s2, then manually restarted
 2. greeted with RC2 GUI and hit enter on default drive (i.e., disk3s2) - after a minute got hung on grey spinning wheel; then manually restarted
 3. at RC2 GUI selected bootable backup disk2s1 and successfully booted into that drive; then manually restarted
 4. at RC2 GUI booted from default boot drive disk3s2 with -v [see results below]
 5. at RC2 GUI booted from default boot drive disk3s2 with -v -x -f
 6. at RC2 GUI booted into backup disk2s1 reinstalled Chameleon RC1 - first, inadvertently installed to disk2s1 (big mistake!); then installed to disk3s2; then manually restarted
 7. NOW BOTH OS X PARTITIONS HANG WITH GREY SPINNING BALL
 8. at RC2 GUI booted from disk2s2 OS X Install Disk - get hung with spinning beach ball on starfield

Here is the last few lines from booting -v from either disk3s2 and disk2s1 (from handwritten notes):

Code: [Select]

kobj_openfile: "/etc/zfs/zpool.cache", err 0
ALF ALERT: sockwall_cntl_updaterules ctl_enqueuedate rts err 55
zfs_module_start: memory footprint 4818816 (kalloc 4818816, kernel 0)
log dir: /Volumes/RAIDzfs/.fseventsd getting new uuid [some long number]
zfs_vfs_mount: error 16
sound assertion "0==fmikeydriver" failed in " /sourcecache/AppleHDA/AppleHDA_162.1.37/AppleHDADriver.cpp" at line 1053 goto handler
This is the last line in log before it hangs.  When I run with -v -x -f, the zfs line is the last line.

From the log messages, my guess is it's choking on mounting ZFS.  I installed ZFS (http://zfs.macosforge.org) subsequent to installing Chameleon RC1.  I created a ZFS RAID pool from 2 partitions on 2 separate disks (disk2 & disk4) and use it for data only, not booting.  It worked perfectly fine prior to installing RC2, RC1 didn't have any problems with it.  But, since (inadvertently) reinstalling RC1 on the backup drive disk2s1 resulted in that drive becoming unbootable - after previously booting post RC2 - doesn't it seem that having the ZFS RAID drive mounted at the time of Chamelon install might have caused the issue I'm having somehow?

At this point, every OS X bootable drive hangs on me.  I can boot into XP and can access the OS X install (disk2s2) via MacDrive, but can't access the boot drives disk3s2 and disk2s2 - "E:\ not accessible, the disk structure is corrupted and unreadable."  I'd love to try to boot OS X and somehow skip over the ZFS part, but don't know how to do that.

I appreciate any help you can give.

[cmcd01]

Any ideas?  Assuming I can get to the command line (e.g., via Terminal in the 10.5 installation DVD), is there some away to edit or remove a startup file so the boot process doesn't get stuck on this ZFS stuff?

[cmcd01]

Just figured out I'm able to boot the system via old BOOT-132 disk.  OK, now what... will try dismounting ZFS stuff and reinstalling Chameleon.

[cmcd01]

OK, I think I'm good.  The steps:

 . booted into backup of OS X (disk2s1) using BOOT-132 cd
 . unmount/unload the zfs pool with :  "zpool export -f name_of_my_zfspool" on the command-line
 . installed Chameleon RC2 to the system disk (disk3s2) then restarted
 . at Chameleon RC2 gui, select disk3s2 - I'm back in!

So, as noted in the previous post, having a mounted zfs pool seems to cause problems with the Chameleon installation program.  Once Chameleon is installed, the zfs pool works fine - the zfs pool is automatically re-mounted with the system restarts, no special commands required.

[eyvind]

Hmm thanks for posting the solution you found .

I just realised you got no input on your problem - don't think mods have abandoned you, they are just really busy answer other threads, with crappy misleading titles and questions that are easily answered.

[cmcd01]

Yes, I kind of felt I was having a conversation with myself .

No problem, I attributed the lack of response to nobody having familiarity with zfs.  Fortunately, just as I had unhappily committed to reinstalling OS X, I found BOOT132 allowed me to access my existing OS X install and apply the workaround described above. 

[Terc]

I have to say, I am very intrigued with ZFS.  I've got a co-worker that runs Solaris x86 and runs filesystem compression, zraid, and does rolling snapshots every 15 minutes.  Really, really cool stuff.  He actually saw an increase in speed when he added the compression (since he's limited by the 106MB/s read of the WD6400AAKS drives we use here, he now sees something closer to 150 to 160MB/s).

How is zfs with OSX?  I'd love to be able to get some of these features, but I'm not willing to give up OSX.  (Yes, I'm looking forward to official support, though it looks like it will be at least 10.7.x before Apple officially rolls zfs out on boot disks)

[cmcd01]

Well, I'm just getting started with zfs so don't have so much to say.  I was mostly interested in implementing a RAID0 with limited disks to boost performance for video/photo processing.  Now I'm curious to play with the compression you mention!  I very quickly and easily setup raid across 2 partitions on 2 different disks shared with other HFS and NTFS partitions (but both disks are GPT).

While pretty easy to setup, I've found zfs filesystems are not entirely integrated into the OS X gui.  The raid volume appears as ejectable in the Finder left panel and subfolders (aka filesystems) appear as independent folders, not in a hierarchy.  And, certain applications seem to have difficulty recognizing zfs filesystems; e.g., iMovie doesn't see my zfs volume. Now, I believe there is a workaround by setting up a mountpoint that maps the zfs volume to a folder on my regular Mac volume, I just haven't had a chance to try it yet.  Finally, documentation is OK but not great, but there's a decent-sized user community to provide help.

All in all, it's a pretty small investment of time (and money  ), so I'd give a shot if you're curious.