ZFS-only installation of FreeBSD 8.1 from DVD

[astralblue]

Update: If you also want to encrypt everything except /boot, refer to this version.

Update: This works for FreeBSD 8.2 as well.

This is a step-by-step guide, mostly for my own reference, but you might find this useful too.

Disclaimer: This article is about clean installation of operating system, where “clean” means that, if you follow these

Comments

[drhikaru]

Eugene is still alive! When can we see a real post?

[astralblue]

What are you talking about, this is a real post!  XD

Good job

[anonymous]

Thanks for the post. I have a situation here, how can i running ZFS mirroring on 3 different hard drives. My end product here i virtualization.
Thank you

Multi-OS drives

[ext_425798]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m count=128

I presume that if I've got at least one other OS (e.g., Windows) on the drive, I should replace /dev/da0 with the FreeBSD partition?

Re: Multi-OS drives

[astralblue]

I'm not sure if you can sub-partition a slice, say da0s2, using GPT. The real question is whether gptzfsloader can still correctly operate in that case.

Think I'm gonna experiment it some time and get back to you. That's an interesting (and probably pretty common) situation...

Thank you for reporting!