ZFS - Unable to replace replacing drive

[S M]

>  What structure is this supposed to be? A stripe of two three-way mirrors?
> And you did "zpool replace vault /dev/ad6.eli /dev/da99.eli" ?

Hi Ivan and all,

Yes, this was meant to be 2x vdevs which are striped, each vdev being a 3 way mirror. 

Yes, /dev/ad6.eli was a problem drive so I plugged /dev/da99.eli into the LSI controller and, as you said, ran zpool replace vault /dev/ad6.eli /dev/da99.eli. Then that drive failed too (coincidence?) but now I can't get rid of the replacing drives.

I've tried all manner of combinations of commands to remove them, even tried finding another drive, changing device.hints to rename that as da99 (which then comes up as FAULTED but the same problem as above happens). 

Stephen - I had a look at dd'ing the drive to get enough zfs metadata out to trick zpool into accepting the drive and trying to resilver, but the problem is that the drive is too far gone - when I plug it in, it just completely hangs the LSI controller, followed by screenfuls of geli errors and timeout errors. When I plug it into the motherboard controller, it doesn't even detect it properly. I can't even get to a point of being able to run seatools against it, so that drive is going to get replaced.

One thing I've noticed is that the zfs implementation doesn't appear to like using the degraded vdev; I thought it tended to favour blank drives to even everything out but it seems to be using the full vdev where it can - is that purely because of the degraded vdev? If so is there anything I can do to restore it? I don't have enough drives to back up the pool and remake it, and that's not a permanent fix anyway.

Cheers

Stu
 		 	   		  
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