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ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 12:08 am
by Ikukuru
I have a Z370N motherboard with 4 SATA ports. I have a PCI-E card with 2 SATA ports. They are all populated with 8TB disks in a mirrored array.

Boot drive is NVMe and I am using the latest Clover and Mojave and ZFS 1.8.1 installer.

Upon booting after a CMOS reset/BIOS update, the disks appear in MacOS Mojave and my ZFS pool works well. Upon subsequent reboots, the 4 ports on the motherboard do not register the ZFS disks. Rarely, the disks randomly appear after a reboot.

Upon testing with APFS SATA disks, there is no such problem.

Has anyone experienced this? Any thoughts on a fix?

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:36 pm
by Sharko
Crucial question: are you using encryption? And if so, is it native ZFS encryption, or FileVault/CoreStorage encryption?

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 3:25 pm
by Ikukuru
hey sharko. No encryption

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 6:28 pm
by Ikukuru
This seems to have been sorted with the addition of zfs_x64.efi from https://efi.akeo.ie/downloads/efifs-latest/x64/

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2019 3:55 am
by nodarkthings
Hi Ikukuru! I'm discovering your post right now and I'm wondering — except for your particular issue — what are the benefits of adding zfs_x64.efi to Clover?
Does it allow MacOS to directly recognize zfs pools? Do you still install "OpenZFS on OS X" together with it?
Is there any risk or downside with it?
Thanks for your clarification about this. ;)

Background: I'm using a "sandwich" of partitions (hfs-zfs-hfs, etc.) and that worked ok until O3X 1.7.2, after that version, including the latest 1.9.0, when I create a new pool inside that sandwich (creating first an HFS partition then sudo zpool create etc.), the pool appears after creation, but on the next boot it doesn't and the HFS partition mounts instead — I have of course tried on different drives to eliminate a possible drive issue.
So, I'm wondering if adding zfs_x64.efi to Clover might solve this issue?

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2019 9:08 am
by abc123
nodarkthings wrote:Hi Ikukuru! I'm discovering your post right now and I'm wondering — except for your particular issue — what are the benefits of adding zfs_x64.efi to Clover?
Background: I'm using a "sandwich" of partitions (hfs-zfs-hfs, etc.) and that worked ok until O3X 1.7.2, after that version, including the latest 1.9.0, when I create a new pool inside that sandwich (creating first an HFS partition then sudo zpool create etc.), the pool appears after creation, but on the next boot it doesn't and the HFS partition mounts instead — I have of course tried on different drives to eliminate a possible drive issue.
So, I'm wondering if adding zfs_x64.efi to Clover might solve this issue?


I'm not sure about the efi driver, but I set up a new pool yesterday on my MBP's internal SSD by first creating an HFS partition. Everything was fine until I rebooted and Mojave mounted the ZFS partition as HFS and corrupted it. I destroyed and re-created the pool and it was then OK.

I found this post: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3261 and it links to this wiki page https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Suppressi ... ing_pop-up which suggests changing the partition type which I've now done. My ZOL box has the partition type set correctly anyway.

I haven't had an issue with rebooting since although I've only done a couple of reboots. I wonder if Mojave is looking for some HFS markers on the disk as well as the partition type which once you've written enough data to the pool are over-written and it stops touching.

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2019 9:38 am
by nodarkthings
abc123> Thanks for the tip! I'll look into it.
If it's the same issue I have, it doesn't seem to be OS related anyway, it behaved like this in 10.9 and now for me in 10.11, so I stayed at O3X v1.7.2.

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2019 9:50 am
by abc123
nodarkthings wrote:abc123> Thanks for the tip! I'll look into it.
If it's the same issue I have, it doesn't seem to be OS related anyway, it behaved like this in 10.9 and now for me in 10.11, so I stayed at O3X v1.7.2.


I wasn't able to reproduce the issue again but I've seen it mentioned before other than not he post here. So if you can reproduce it, it will be good to know if the partition type fixes it.

Re: ZFS disks sometimes not appearing in Mojave

PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2019 2:28 pm
by nodarkthings
Hurray! The gdisk thing really made it! Thanks a lot!
Looks like it was not mandatory until v1.7.2 so, while I've been using it on my existing partitions, I completely forgot it for the new partitions created with recent versions... :mrgreen: