Got myself into a bit of a pickle...

[mph]

I have a 4-bay HP Microserver running FreeNAS 9.10.1-U4.

I recently bought 4 new WD RED drives to replace unreliable desktop drives.
I had two mirrored volumes setup, so copied all data onto one mirrored volume and took all drives out apart from one.
This left me with a degraded mirror with all my data still accessible.

Then I put 3 new drives in and created a raidz1 volume (thinking I could add the 4th after all data had been copied over).
So now that I've discovered I can't extend my raidz1 volume, I'm stuck with what do to with the 4th drive?
If I want to convert to a raidz2 volume, I have to take ALL my data off, re-pool, and copy back on again!

So I thought why not offline disk 3 from the raidz1 and add a new mirrored vdev using disks 3+4 to the volume. No canny do, as vdevs have to be of the same type.

So then I thought ok make a new mirrored volume using disks 3+4, copy data from the degraded raidz1, then add a new mirrored vdev back into the new volume. When I try to create the mirror, I get "invalid vdev specification, disk3 is part of active pool". So the disk is showing as offline, but how do I actually remove it from the pool, to use it in a new pool? (without losing all my data!)

 

[joeschmuck]

First, do you have all your data somewhere? Sure you may need to copy it over again but it's better than loosing it. If you don't then you need to copy it off to a safe place. This should be your priority.

If you have your data, I'd wipe all the new disks and recreate the pool as you originally intended. Next copy the data to the pool. All the stuff you are trying to do listed above is just a mess.

 

[mph]

Yes I have most of the data on another drive which I can attach over USB.
Is it possible to "zfs send" only a parent dataset with it's files and not the child datasets? I already have a backup of one rather large child dataset, so I want to avoid backing up that one. Is it possible to move a child dataset?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is it possible to "zfs send" only a parent dataset with it's files and not the child datasets?

Yes, just don't add the flag for a recursive replication.

 

[mph]

Yes, just don't add the flag for a recursive replication.

Yup, figured that one out in the end!