On 03/11/2018 08:03 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general wrote:
Hi David,
so in the end you were able to boot off usb, right?
Also, the nightmare you had to work through can be avoided on servers where you run illumos or FreeBSD by way of ZFS boot environments (BE). Basically, it's like Windows style snapshots of core files you can boot, in case stuff goes south.
I didn't post this to the list, since it mentions ZFS, and that alone might get some people pissed off.
Partially, I had to boot from the CD, because the BIOS (AMI circa 2005) does not have the capability to boot from USB. But, by using both the CD and USB (having plugged the USB in before boot), when the boot from CD got to the point it looked for the disk label ARCH_201803, it found the USB stick and was able to mount it at /run/archiso/bootmnt where the boot from CD alone always fails. No worries about the filesystem. I don't care whether it is xfs, zfs, ext, but it won't be btrfs, I just dance with the one that brung me. I did do a filesystem comparison several months ago, and since I never reach limitations of ext inodes anyway, zfs didn't have anything else that really moved me to switch. I don't max my disks anyway. If I'm running 1T drives and hit 850G, I'll go 3T and so on... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.