I asked a friend of mine about such a scenario, where computer
became paper-weight or boat-anchor, but disk survives.

But note: when solaris was installed, foolishly only one
zfs pool was created, which held EVERYTHING.

And you then had to buy a new sparc-based computer, installed
Solaris, and it works fine.

QUESTION: that prior saved-disk, with its single zpool:
 can you add it as an extra disk on the new machine,
 and somehow recover or tar off some or all of
 what's on it?

He says "maybe not; it'd certainly be a problem, 
something about the boot block giving a problem 
when booting the machine, etc.

Or is it really easy?  Like somehow (how?) making that prior disk be
seen as another pool, maybe?


(Man, do I find this stuff CONFUSING!)

THANKS!

David

On 2012-08-10 08:00:43 +0000, David Combs said:

> I asked a friend of mine about such a scenario, where computer
> became paper-weight or boat-anchor, but disk survives.
> 
> But note: when solaris was installed, foolishly only one
> zfs pool was created, which held EVERYTHING.
> 
> And you then had to buy a new sparc-based computer, installed
> Solaris, and it works fine.
> 
> QUESTION: that prior saved-disk, with its single zpool:
>  can you add it as an extra disk on the new machine,
>  and somehow recover or tar off some or all of
>  what's on it?

He should be able to import the pool stored on the old disk. Once 
imported and mounted in the filesystem, use cp, tar, whatever you want. 
Or keep using the pool?

If both pools are called "rpool" he will have to look at the options 
for "zpool import" to (temporarily, permanently?) rename the old pool.

-- 
Chris

In article <k02f3b$cqs$1@panix3.panix.com>,
David Combs <dkcombs@panix.com> wrote:
>Or is it really easy?  Like somehow (how?) making that prior disk be
>seen as another pool, maybe?

Yes, really easy, see zpool(1M) import
<URL:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1462/zpool-1m.html#scrolltoc>

John
groenveld@acm.org

Connect the disk to the system and boot. The pool on the 2nd disk will not be mounted.
run zpool import to see the name of the pool.
zpool import -f -R /mnt <poolname>

In article <8f4244b3-630f-4bfb-90e7-82469b632fd4@googlegroups.com>,
 <rdhalstead@gmail.com> wrote:
>Connect the disk to the system and boot. The pool on the 2nd disk will not be mounted.
>run zpool import to see the name of the pool.
>zpool import -f -R /mnt <poolname>
>

Thanks!

David