# Root on ZFS on USB pendrive stalls at boot



## bpl (Jun 5, 2020)

Hello!

I'm very excited to get started with FreeBSD and am hoping to migrate my Debian home server to the FreeBSD 12.1 Release (goodbye systemd, hello ZFS  ). To keep the old system running without much disturbance, my plan is to first install FreeBSD to a USB flash drive and then later move the installation to a mirrored pair of internal SSDs (which are currently in use by Linux). I figured the latter migration should be pretty easy with ZFS.

Hardware: Zotac H67-ITX mainboard (Intel H67 chipset), Intel Core i3-2120 CPU (Sandy Bridge), 4GB of RAM.

I did a basic install from a 1GB USB flash drive (FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img, da1 during installation), keeping most options at the defaults. I picked the Auto ZFS option, striped on 1 disk (a 16GB USB flash drive, da0 during installation), with the default GPT (BIOS+UEFI) partition scheme. When rebooting into the new system it quickly halts after picking the Multi-User option from the boot menu. 
The last message I see is:

```
EFI framebuffer information:
addr, size 0xc0000000, 0x3ff0000
dimensions 640x480
stride 640
masks 0x00ff0000,0x0000ff00, 0x000000ff, 0xff000000
```
See the attached screenshot. Then the cursor keeps blinking and the machine does not even respond to ctrl+alt+del.

Any ideas what could go wrong here or how I can debug it? Could the device identifier have changed? (I'm assuming it will still be da0 after the reboot.)

I have tried other options as well like "GPT (UEFI)" and "GPT (BIOS)" but all end up in this state. If I try the old "MBR (BIOS)" my BIOS does not recognize it as a bootable drive. 

I have to insert the bootable media into specific USB 2.0 ports, otherwise the BIOS does not recognize them as bootable drives. So after installation and shutdown I remove both flash drives and insert the drive with the fresh installation into the port that previously hosted the FreeBSD live drive. Not sure if that makes a difference.

Thanks!


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## bpl (Jun 6, 2020)

A few more observations:

I can boot from the USB flash drive with ZFS as the root file system on my laptop (Thinkpad T460s).
I can boot from the USB flash drive with UFS as the root file system on my server. (But man, does that slow down the unpacking of the txz archives during installation!  )
So somehow the ZFS USB installation does not play nicely with my specific server hardware. Haven't gotten to the bottom of it though.

I managed to free up one of the internal SSDs, so I'll install FreeBSD with root on ZFS on that drive next.


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