[OpenIndiana-discuss] Destroying unavailable ZFS dataset

[Steve Gonczi]

Ok.. . I am still a bit unclear about what you are trying to accomplish. 
I am puzzled by your "jail drive" reference. 

I think you are trying to re-cycle an ssd that was part of another pool 
earlier. You do not care about preserving any of the information that is still 
on this ssd, except that it prevents you from reusing this ssd in another pool. 
I am thinking, this woudl be the case, as the SSD was part of a root pool, 
with mostly the OS on it, which probably would not be useful on a new hardware box. 

Is this correct? 

Importing the ssd is probably not the way to go. 

Each Zfs drive that has been part of a pool contains 4 copies of the Zfs disk label. 
(To copies at the beginning of the drive, and another 2 copies at the end of the 
addressable range. 

The disk labels contain information for the pool that the drive was part of. 
The information in an individual drive's disk label is not necessarily complete in 
and by itself, but the sum of disk labels contain all the config information needed to put 
the storage pool back together. 

The purpose of the zpool import command is to reconstruct a pool (possibly on a different 
host) from a coherent set of drives. 
The import command reads and merges all information from all disk labels it can find, 
and melds these together to form a pool configuration. If this succeeds, then it will use the 
resulting configuration to open the pool. 

Importing a single drive typically will not have all the necessary information for the import to succeed 
(it may, depending on the configuration) 
Even if the information is all there, the import can not succeed unless all the 
original drives are present. 

Technically, some non-essential drives may be missing and you still 
may succeed (spares, l2arc.. not sure without looking if it would work with half of a mirror, it may) 
but the essential participant drives need to be there. 

I think you can just add the drive to an existing pool, or create a new pool 
using the -f option to override the warning 
you will get (complaining about the drive having been part of another pool). 

Steve 

>I am concluding that something on the old SSD drive still has a record 
>of the old ZFS set which must have been stored somewhere other than the 
>standard partitions ... I don't know where else this information could 
>have come from.