Degraded zpool cannot detach old/bad drive

[jhell]

On 10/31/2010 15:53, Rumen Telbizov wrote:
> Hi Artem, everyone,
> 
> Here's the latest update on my case.
> I did upgrade the system to the latest stable: 8.1-STABLE FreeBSD 8.1-STABLE
> #0: Sun Oct 31 11:44:06 PDT 2010
> After that I did zpool upgrade and zfs upgrade -r all the filesystems.
> Currently I am running zpool 15 and zfs 4.
> Everything went fine with the upgrade but unfortunately my problem still
> persists. There's no difference in this aspect.
> I still have mfid devices. I also tried chmod-ing as you suggested /dev/mfid
> devices but zfs/zpool didn't seem to care and imported
> the array regardless.
> 
> So at this point since no one else seems to have any ideas and we seem to be
> stuck I am almost ready to declare defeat on this one.
> Although the pool is usable I couldn't bring it back to exactly the same
> state as it was before the disk replacements took place.
> Disappointing indeed, although not a complete show stopper.
> 
> I still think that if there's a way to edit the cache file and change the
> devices that might do the trick.
> 
> Thanks for all the help,
> Rumen Telbizov
> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Artem Belevich <fbsdlist at src.cx> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Rumen Telbizov <telbizov at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> FreeBSD 8.1-STABLE #0: Sun Sep  5 00:22:45 PDT 2010
>>> That's when I csuped and rebuilt world/kernel.
>>
>> There were a lot of ZFS-related MFCs since then. I'd suggest updating
>> to the most recent -stable and try again.
>>
>> I've got another idea that may or may not work. Assuming that GPT
>> labels disappear because zpool opens one of the /dev/mfid* devices,
>> you can try to do "chmod a-rw /dev/mfid*" on them and then try
>> importing the pool again.
>>
>> --Artem
>>
> 
> 
> 

The problem seems to be that its just finding the actual disk before it
finds the GPT labels. You should be able to export the pool and then
re-import the pool after hiding the disks that it is finding via
/etc/devfs.rules file.

Try adding something like (WARNING: This will hide all devices mfi)
adjust accordingly:
add path 'mfi*' hide

To your devfs ruleset before re-importing the pool and that should make
ZFS go wondering around /dev enough to find the appropriate GPT label
for the disk it is trying to locate.

It would seem to me that using '-d' in this case would not be effective
as ZFS would be looking for 'gpt/LABEL' within /dev/gpt/ if memory
serves correctly, and obviously path /dev/gpt/gpt/ would not exist. Also
even if it did find the correct gpt label then it would be assuming its
at a /dev path and not /dev/gpt/* and would fall back to finding the mfi
devices after the next boot again.

-- 

 jhell,v