Problems replacing failing drive in ZFS pool

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Dan Langille <dan at langille.org> wrote:

> I think it's because you pull the old drive, boot with the new drive,
>> the controller re-numbers all the devices (ie da3 is now da2, da2 is
>> now da1, da1 is now da0, da0 is now da6, etc), and ZFS thinks that all
>> the drives have changed, thus corrupting the pool.  I've had this
>> happen on our storage servers a couple of times before I started using
>> glabel(8) on all our drives (dead drive on RAID controller, remove
>> drive, reboot for whatever reason, all device nodes are renumbered,
>> everything goes kablooey).
>>
>
>
> Can you explain a bit about how you use glabel(8) in conjunction with ZFS?
>  If I can retrofit this into an exist ZFS array to make things easier in the
> future...
>

If you've used whole disks in ZFS, you can't retrofit it if by retrofit you
mean an almost painless method of resolving this.  GEOM setup stuff
generally should happen BEFORE the file system is on it.

You would create your partition(s) slightly smaller than the disk, label it,
then use the resulting device as your zfs device when creating the pool.  If
you have an existing full disk install, that means restoring the data after
you've done those steps.  It works just as well with MBR style partitioning,
there's nothing saying you have to use GPT.  GPT is just better though in
terms of ease of use IMO among other things.

-- 
Adam Vande More