# FreeBSD 9 and GPT ZFS boot



## sagi446 (Apr 2, 2012)

Hello,

I have installed FreeBSD on my disk (a whole dedicated disk) on a ZFS pool. It's been working great but now it won't even boot.

The ZFS bootstrap outputs 
	
	



```
can't find 'kernel'
```

Oddly, it doesn't output that it found /boot/defaults/loader.conf or /boot/loader.conf like the USB image does.
When using *lsdev* (the only command that outputs anything useful) it calls the ZFS disk's partition "FFS".
I tried to scrub the pool, no errors at all.
I am positive that zpool.cache resides in /boot/zfs/
I did a *freebsd-update*, I noticed that it broke ZFS boot on 8.0 and 8.1 releases, however I don't know if that's still the case now.

Sorry that I couldn't get any logs, I am not running it on a VM. TIA


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## sagi446 (Apr 2, 2012)

Apparently, the FFS partition was the FreeBSD 9 USB image.

*R*egardless, after more investigation. It seems that gptzfsloader works fine and loads zfsloader from the zfs pool. However, it's the zfsloader that's the major letdown. It doesn't recognize the ZFS pool.

Could it be a freebsd-update that killed off the zfsloader? This happened after I restarted from an update. I rebuilt a zfsloader from /usr/src and it's still plagued.

Any ideas how I could fix that? At the moment, the best solution seems using PC-BSD.


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