zfs discuss - Apr 2008 - Recovering Faulted ZFS pool

Hi, I''m hoping that I''ve just missed something obvious but
here is my situation and question.

I have a ZFS pool created across 4 SATA drives, these were separate to my actual
OpenSolaris install. The drive that had my OpenSolaris install crashed and was
completely unrecoverable. Originally this OS drive was a PATA drive and the ZFS
pool was on 4 SATA drives.

I physically removed one of the SATA drives and put in a spare 80gig SATA drive
to re-install my OS. When I had everything up and running I tried to import the
ZFS pool and was presented with a faulted pool. Since the pool was unavailable
there was nothing I could do to update the pool config to tell it not to look
for now missing 4th drive. "zpool import -f" also failed.

I then shutdown and booted into Benelix using a LiveCD and replaced the original
4th drive from the pool... even with this the pool was still faulted and could
not be imported.

So my question is if you lose your operating system how do you go about getting
back at the ZFS pool that was originally created?
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

I hate it when I find a problem in a forum that matches my problem but no
replies. So I will update this with the information I have found.

First of all the Benelix LiveCD uses a different version of ZFS, hence why it
was having so much trouble trying to import the zpool from the other machine.

I have now successfully moved my zpool between different OS installs. I think
that the important thing is to no reinstall onto a drive ID that is part of the
original zpool. This was where I made the mistake.

You have to figure out a way of being able to bring up a system and leave any of
the drive IDs that are associated with the zpool either occupied by their proper
zpool member disc or left unused. This will then allow you to import the zpool
into another install and then change the configuration.

So for instance, I had c0d0, c1d0, c2d0 and c3d0. My OS was on a different PATA
drive. I can''t remember the actual drive ID... so for
argument''s sake lets call it c1t1d0. When I rebuilt the machine since I
was out of SATA port I unplugged the original c3d0 and stuck a new HDD in
it''s place. THIS WAS MY ERROR... I should''ve figured out a way
that I could bring up the machine and LEAVE c3d0 unused. This would''ve
then allowed me to import the zpool into the new install and then remove c3d0
from the zpool configuration.

If anyone wants to chime in with whether any of this is correct I would
appreciate it, but in the meantime I hope this might help someone...
 
 
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