# Reinstallation Current versus Release (ZFS Boot)



## aorchid (Jun 1, 2011)

Hello,

It looks like I will need to reinstall my boot drive as the SMART indicator suggests imminent failure (it has been two weeks already). However, I had been using ZFS on Solaris and have lots of drives with data in zfs version >15 which I would like to use. I was wondering if it would be a better idea maybe to reinstall version 9-Current rather than 8.2-Release to get the latest zfs and have zfs on boot. All of my data is on a separate ZFS internal drive, so I can freely clear the boot drive for the reinstall. My concern is that this is a production workstation and I have no other FreeBSD computer to try this on first. 

Thanks for any suggestions. 
aric


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## SirDice (Jun 1, 2011)

If you have zpools with version 15 or lower you can use 8.2-RELEASE. If the version is higher you're pretty much stuck with 9.0-CURRENT. You don't need to use zfsboot, you can also just boot from the standard UFS and use the ZFS filesystems as extra storage.

Since the release of 9.0 will be imminent it should be reasonably stable now.


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