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ZFS

ZFS boot, storage, expansion, and troubleshooting articles.

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ZFS Articles

Technical notes and guides tagged under ZFS.

ZFS failed to read pad2 area of primary vdev

There are number of issues that can lead to this error when trying to boot a FreeBSD server with ZFS as root / zroot: ZFS failed to read pad2 area of...

  • FreeBSD
  • partitioning
  • systems administration
  • ZFS
  • ZFS Boot
  • zroot
Published
Reading time
1 minute

SOLVED: linker_load_file: /boot/modules/openzfs.ko – unsupported file type

While trying to recover and upgrade a FreeBSD install we ran into an issue where the kernel loader would hang when loading openzfs.ko: linker_load_file...

  • FreeBSD
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
1 minute

SOLVED: FreeBSD 12.2 ZFS: can only boot from disk, mirror, raidz1, raidz2, and raidz3 vdevs

After upgrading a file server to FreeBSD 12.2 this last week we ran into an interesting issue where the boot loader immediately errored with the following...

  • booting
  • error
  • FreeBSD
  • GPT
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
2 minutes

Expand ZFS To Use Larger Disks / Free Space

One of the great features of ZFS is to be able to expand it using new, larger disks — even while it is online. To do this you’ll replace each disk...

  • FreeBSD
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
1 minute

HOW TO: Windows 10 Under Bhyve /w FreeBSD 11

Windows 10 installing on a FreeBSD 11.0 Bhyve VM With FreeBSD 11 comes a new version of Bhyve with a feature that makes installing Windows 10 a snap: a...

  • Bhyve
  • FreeBSD
  • Windows
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
6 minutes

FreeBSD Hangs on “Trying to mount root from zfs:zroot”

There are many reasons this can happen, but this one I believe is unique in terms of searching the internet for the error. We’d see a newly imaged (or...

  • booting
  • FreeBSD
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
1 minute

FreeBSD Hardware RAID vs. GMIRROR vs. ZFS

The ultimate storage shootout! With years of building and testing servers in various configurations we have always suspected hardware RAID was not all...

  • FreeBSD
  • gmirror
  • Performance
  • RAID
  • SSD
  • UFS
  • UNIX
  • ZFS
Published
Reading time
6 minutes

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