[OpenIndiana-discuss] Disk re-labelling and zfs

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

I'm migrating a laptop to a new hdd, and opened a can of worms. Would anyone share ideas on catching them? :)

1) Initially the new disk was in an USB cradle, so its 'type' in Solaris format saved that string. It is quite inconvenient when I've now swapped the disks and use the cradle for the old one, but the type is mis-assigned (says 'cradle id' for the system disk now internal, not for one actually in the cradle).
This bit of info survives dualboots and failsafe/livecd boots.

So I went to 'format / type / auto (0)' and again to apply this layout whose numeric fields looked exactly like the old one's - only the name changed. 

Then I went to partitions to redefine the rpool slice, and labeled the disk.

However, 'zpool import (-D too)' no longer finds the rpool, and upon reboot grub fails (i guess it can not proceed to find the menu file); reinstalling grub from failsafe image did not help, so booting up is now again tricky ;)

Any ideas if the zfs pool can be salvaged, or must be recreated?

2) i'm not too much opposed to recreation this time, because the WD SSHD disk said it had 512/512 byte sectors, but upon pool import it says that my block alignment sucks. I guess the ssd layer of the disk exposes some different sectors than what partdd saw and zpool used by default.

Should tweaks in livecd/failsafe sd.conf, so I use e.g. 4kb sectors, fix it?

3) the old disk did have some issues and so even a zfs cksum error (in a copies=1 relatively disposable dataset). Despite failmode=continue, the old disk disappeared from under the running system as soon as 'zfs send' or 'rsync' got to reading the corrupt block. Given that this was the rpool disk, only reboots allowed to regain the system. Not warning about yanking the disk ever got into serial console logs nor terminal nor /var/adm/messages.

This was uncool and required complicated workarounds to recreate the history (and clone-linking) of involved datasets on the new disk with rsync and zfs combined ;(

Thanks in advance, 
Jim
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