Installation problems

[stream]

Please don't post pictures of text. Just copy and paste it. The information that's shown doesn't add up with what you mentioned before:


Your system isn't installed on ada0. You have a mfi(4) based RAID card with 4 disks (mfisyspd0 to mfisyspd3), that's split up and used as two mirrored ZFS pools.

Sir-
Unfortunately, I cannot copy paste. that is why I had to type up this outputs in my earlier posts.
yes- previously I typed up the info manually and used equivalent terms for simplicity. Please substitute ada0-3 to the mfisyspd0-3.
Also the boot pool is ok on disk0/2. Per dmesg and gpart horrors, the other pool is corrupt and/or invalid, and I want to clean it up and setup a different mirrored ZFS pool on disk1/3.
And none of the commands that I am aware of seem to be working.

 

[Emrion]

How can people help you if you lie about the real problem?
I was thinking you have an active zpool on the disk - sorry the disks - you want to reuse...
Ever read zpool(8)?

 

[stream]

How can people help you if you lie about the real problem?
I was thinking you have an active zpool on the disk - sorry the disks - you want to reuse...
Ever read zpool(8)?

Emrion-- I think you are mistating. sorry.

I have typed up the core problem- I reinstalled the OS. and I can boot+login. OS say is installed in one mirror and gpart etc commands work. But I have other non-boot disks which I am unable to use right now. As I have stated dmesg gives me error message that the primary partition is corrupt or invalid. And I can't seem to clean up these other disk(s).
I just need to know how to force a restore or clean on this other disk(s), and use gpart etc the normal way.
The one thing I can think of is reinstall the OS again. I very much would l like to avoid that.

 

[SirDice]

I typed up the info manually and used equivalent terms for simplicity.

You're not 'simplifying' things, you're causing a lot of confusion. ada(4) is a completely different kind of disk. Never do this please.

Please substitute ada0-3 to the mfisyspd0-3.

In that case, you can't access that disk directly because mfisyspd1 is part of the zdata pool.

How can people help you if you lie about the real problem?

"lie" or "lying" implies malicious intent. I don't believe there's been malicious intent here.

 

[Alain De Vos]

Well i don't waste time on speculation of hiding motives. Good luck to your setup.

 

[stream]

You're not 'simplifying' things, you're causing a lot of confusion. ada(4) is a completely different kind of disk. Never do this please.


In that case, you can't access that disk directly because mfisyspd1 is part of the zdata pool.


"lie" or "lying" implies malicious intent. I don't believe there's been malicious intent here.

I apologize for the confusion.
Yes, the thing is these are prior mirrors/pool on the disks. and I tried to clean up.

I now tried zpool destroy -f zdata. and the output shown in the attachment

 

[SirDice]

You need to 'export' the pool first. That will cause everything to be unmounted and the pool to be removed from the system. Then you can 'destroy' the pool. Once the pool is destroyed you can access those disks individually (partition, dd(1), whatever you want to do with them).

The reason the partition table appears to be corrupt is because you've used those disks as a whole (not a partition on those disks) in the pool. This will overwrite parts of the original partition table that used to be on there. Because some parts of that old partition table survived you get the error messages. Just clear the disk or gpart destroy the old partition tables.

 

[stream]

You need to 'export' the pool first. That will cause everything to be unmounted and the pool to be removed from the system. Then you can 'destroy' the pool. Once the pool is destroyed you can access those disks individually (partition, dd(1), whatever you want to do with them).

The reason the partition table appears to be corrupt is because you've used those disks as a whole (not a partition on those disks) in the pool. This will overwrite parts of the original partition table that used to be on there. Because some parts of that old partition table survived you get the error messages. Just clear the disk or gpart destroy the old partition tables.

SIr-
Yes, all commands working now.. Yay
TyTy..

Yes, I read somewhere that it is better to use the entire disk rather than partitions. The ZFS administration documentation too has examples of creating mirror with the entire disk, I think.
Anyway, learned a few things today.

Thank you all.

 

[SirDice]

Yes, I read somewhere that it is better to use the entire disk rather than partitions.

It actually doesn't matter these days. There's nothing to gain or lose performance wise. Using partitions makes the disk and its contents more easier to identify for us humans. And the few KB a partition table uses is hardly going to matter on a multi-TB of disk space. You do need to make sure the partitions neatly line up with the actual sector sizes of the disks, or else it will have a negative impact on performance.