ZFS: Can't repair raidz2 (Cannot replace a replacing device)

[Steven Schlansker]

On Dec 22, 2009, at 3:15 PM, Miroslav Lachman wrote:

> Steven Schlansker wrote:
>> As a corollary, you may notice some funky concat business going on.
>> This is because I have drives which are very slightly different in size (<  1MB)
>> and whenever one of them goes down and I bring the pool up, it helpfully (?)
>> expands the pool by a whole megabyte then won't let the drive back in.
>> This is extremely frustrating... is there any way to fix that?  I'm
>> eventually going to keep expanding each of my drives one megabyte at a time
>> using gconcat and space on another drive!  Very frustrating...
> 
> You can avoid it by partitioning the drives to the well known 'minimal' size (size of smallest disk) and use the partition instead of raw disk.
> For example ad12s1 instead of ad12 (if you creat slices by fdisk)
> of ad12p1 (if you creat partitions by gpart)


Yes, this makes sense.  Unfortunately, I didn't do this when I first made the array
as the documentation says you should use whole disks so that it can enable the write
cache, which I took to mean you shouldn't use a partition table.  And now there's no
way to fix it after the fact, as you can't shrink a zpool even by a single
MB :(