[OpenIndiana-discuss] The kiss of death

[Reginald Beardsley]

I have been using labelclear which is a huge improvement. In the past I had to write a script to do it using dd. So far I've been unable to find a good diagram showing the various disk labels, boot blocks, etc. The best documentation I've found to date is the ZFS chapter in McKusick et al. I've not yet ordered the "IT Mastery" ZFS books but shall.

IIRC I had done an install into an existing pool created by hand. When Groenveld commented about the ability to create a RAIDZ2 pool in the text installer I tried using that. However, whereas I had created a single s0 slice, the text installer created a 250 MB s0 slice with the rest of the disk in s1. I think that the error message was the result of a label in the now much smaller and unused s0 slice.

This is somewhat speculative given the staggering number of installs I've done trying to collect information about what prevented 2021.04-rc1 from booting to the desktop.

Maddeningly, format(1m) will sometimes let me modify the label to go back to a single s0 slice and sometimes it won't. I've been unable to discern a pattern, so that will have to wait until I have time to run it under dbx.

Reg
     On Sunday, April 25, 2021, 07:04:23 AM CDT, Volker A. Brandt <vab at bb-c.de> wrote:  
 
 Hi Reg!


>  FWIW I saw the messages that Nelson posted at the start of this discussion on systems that booted. However, they very likely had relic zfs labels. I've had mysterious "corrupted pools" appear which I was only able to fix by using dd(1) to wipe out the old label.

Recent-ish illumos ZFS versions (and presumably OpenZFS, too) have

  zpool labelclear <device>


Regards -- Volker
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