problem with geli and LSI controller

[Marc UBM]

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 15:32:26 -0700
John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:

> Marc UBM Bocklet wrote this message on Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 15:29 +0200:
> > On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 14:56:46 +0200
> > Marc "UBM" Bocklet <ubm at u-boot-man.de> wrote:
> > 
> > > > 
> > > > This sounds like the drives were in raid0 mode, and not raw disk
> > > > mode...  You might be able to recover the disk w/ geli resize,
> > > > assuming only space was added at the end, not at the begining, but
> > > > I have never personally tried that myself...  I'd recommend trying
> > > > on a copy of the drive so you don't loose data if that is possible..
> > > 
> > > And one more question, directed at the list: even if geli manages to
> > > move the metadata via resize, the gpart metadata is probably still
> > > lost? 
> 
> It depends..  did you gpart it first and the geli it? or the other
> way around?
> 
> If you gpart'd it first, you should be able to see your partitions,
> if you can't then getting a replacement controller card makes the
> most sense, as it's likely that the RAID card meta data is at the
> begining of the drive...
> 
> gpart also supports the resize command...
> 
> > Replying to myself again, it appears that the safest way is to get a
> > Rocket Raid controller identical to the one we had, put it in another
> > system, connect the disks, import the old pool and move the data to the
> > new pool on the the LSI controller.
> > 
> > Am I overlooking anything?
> 
> Nope...  As someone else said, this is the dangers of RAID cards...

Thanks a lot for all your input and help - I learned a lot!
In the end, we bought a used Rocket Raid controller, imported the pool
and copied the data to the new pool.

Most important lesson learned: use an HBA for zfs!


Cheers,
Marc