# FreeBSD 7.0 won't boot with gmirror?



## tomh009 (Nov 27, 2008)

I have been working on building a new server (dual Opteron 242, running amd64 of course).  I want to use gmirror to get RAID 1 across the two hot-swap SCSI drives.  The instructions are easy enough, and I can create the gmirror set without problems.  

But then I add this line to /boot/loader.conf:

```
geom_mirror_load="YES"
```

After that, the next boot will fail with this message immediately after gmirror is loaded:

```
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/mirror/gm0.journals1a

Manual root filesystem specification:
<fstype>:<device> Mount <device> using filesystem <fstype>
eg. ufs:da0s1a
?
```

This happens whether I actually have an active gmirror set (ie mirroring the entire disk) or haven't set one up yet (mirroring only slice 2 on each disk).  And at this point my USB keyboard is not functional (even though it was detected earlier) so I can't even test entering something here.

Surely I am not the first one to use gmirror on 7.0-RELEASE -- what am I missing here?


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## brd@ (Nov 28, 2008)

Your /etc/fstab is missed up, it looks like you have:

```
/dev/mirror/gm0.journals1a
```
where you need:

```
/dev/mirror/gm0s1a
```
I'm not sure why the keyboard isn't working, try grabbing a PS/2 Keyboard for this single user mode work.


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## tomh009 (Nov 28, 2008)

brd@ said:
			
		

> Your /etc/fstab is missed up, it looks like you have:
> 
> ```
> /dev/mirror/gm0.journals1a
> ...



Sorry for the confusion on the error message (that's what I get for trying multiple times and then trying to manually post boot error messages) -- for my final test, where I only gmirrored the second slice, I actually had no gm0 filesystems at all in /etc/fstab, so no gmirror devices should have been mounted.

And doing a "gmirror load" after boot works just fine.  Unfortunately that means that the gmirror-based filesystem is not available to daemons that are started automatically.

Unfortunately the server has no PS/2 ports at all so a USB keyboard is all I can use.


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## tomh009 (Nov 28, 2008)

For additional clarification, this is the error I saw in my last attempt (geom_mirror_load enabled, gmirror only on slice 2, root on native disk):

```
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/da0s1a

Manual root filesystem specification:
<fstype>:<device> Mount <device> using filesystem <fstype>
eg. ufs:da0s1a
?
```

I then booted with the install CD, and used a live FS CD to remove the geom_mirror_load line from loader.config (no changes to fstab), and the system booted correctly.  (And "gmirror load" worked fine once booted.)


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## brd@ (Nov 28, 2008)

Can you post the contents of /etc/fstab now that you have the machine booted?


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## tomh009 (Nov 28, 2008)

Here is the /etc/fstab (unchanged since the boot problems):

```
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/da0s1b             none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/da0s1a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/da0s1d             /usr            ufs     rw              2       2
#/dev/da0s2d            /local          ufs     rw              2       2

#/dev/da1s1b            none            swap    sw              0       0
#/dev/da1s2d            /local2         ufs     rw              2       2
#/dev/da1s1d            /root2          ufs     rw              2       2
#/dev/da1s1e            /usr2           ufs     rw              2       2

/dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0
```


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