Re: Boot from disk, serial console over IPMI help for DL160 G6

On 7/19/21 10:21 AM, Tobias Nygren wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Jul 2021 09:58:30 -0700
> Jeff Rizzo <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> In case it clarifies anything, here's what the GPT looks like on all the
>> disks (more or less):
>>
>>          start        size  index  contents
>>              0           1         PMBR
>>              1           1         Pri GPT header
>>              2          32         Pri GPT table
>>             34   230686720      1  GPT part - NetBSD RAIDFrame component
>>      230686754  7583350381      2  GPT part - ZFS
>>     7814037135          32         Sec GPT table
>>     7814037167           1         Sec GPT header
>>
>>
>> Anyone care to help?  :)  Thanks in advance!
> You don't want to align your paritions to offset 34 on modern
> disks. That is bad for performance. Disks internally use 4k sectors
> even if they expose the 512b interface so you want to either use a
> smaller GPT header so you can start at offset 32, or start at offset
> 64. (Linux and Windows installers typically add the first partition at
> offset 1024 or even 2048 which is a bit overkill.)


Ugh.  Yeah, I knew this, but didn't bother to do the mental arithmetic.  
This is why I tried using sysinst to install - so all this would get 
handled without me having to deal with the details.  Ah, well.


>
> To install boot loader for this non-UEFI(*) system:
>
> gpt biosboot -A -i 1
> installboot -v /dev/rdk0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2
> and ditto for the other raidframe component


Oh, right!  GPT biosboot... I suspect that's what I'm missing.


> (*) You don't have an EFI System Partition so this installation can't
> support EFI unless you wipe everything and start over.
>
> If you want to try EFI boot you must create a gpt partition
> with type efi, format it as msdosfs, mount in on /mnt and
> copy /usr/mdec/bootx64.efi to /mnt/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi.


Since wd2 and wd3 don't currently have anything in the RAID partition, I 
will probably  redo the installation there to fix the alignment... so, I 
should create that anyway just in case.

> Kind regards,
> -Tobias


Thanks!

+j