Roy, Thanks for your reply.
I did get a new drive and attempted the approach (as you have suggested pre your reply) however once booted off the OpenSolaris Live CD (or the rebuilt new drive), I was not able to import the rpool (which I had established had sector errors). I expect I should have had some success if the vdev labels were intact (I currently suspect some critical boot files are impacted by bad sectors resulting in failed boot attempts from that partition slice). Unfortunately, I didn't keep a copy of the messages (if any - I have tried many permutations since). At my last attempt ... I installed knoppix (debian) on one of the partitions (also allowed access to smartctl and hdparm too - I was hoping to reduce the read timeout to speed up the exercise), then added zfs-fuse (to access the space I will use to stage the recovery file) and added dd_rescue and gnu ddrescue packages. smartctl appears not to be able to manage the disk while attached to usb (but I am guessing because don't have much experience with it). At this point I attempted dd_rescue to create an image of the partition with bad sectors (hoping there were efficiencies beyong normal dd) but it was at 5.6GB in 36 hours, so again I needed to abort however it does log the blocks attempted so far so hopefully I can skip past them when I next get an opportunity. Although it does now appear that gnu ddrescue is the preferred of the two utilities which I may opt to use to look at creating an image of the partition before attempting recovery of the slice (rpool). As an aside, I noticed that the knoppix 'dmesg | grep sd' command which reflects the primary partition devices, no longer appears to reflect the solaris partition (p2) slice devices (as it would the extended p4 partitions logical partition devices configured). I suspect due to this, the rpool (one of the solaris partition slices) appears not to be detected by the knoppix zfs-fuse 'zpool import' (although I can access the zpool which exists on partition p3). I wonder if this is related to the transition from ufs to zfs? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
