Using Solaris on your laptop is a rewarding and sometimes intriguing experience…
I used Solaris Express for a while on my laptop because the official release of Solaris did not yet support my Relatek network card. I had settled on build 55 of Nevada, Solaris Express march 07 or so.
Wanting to upgrade to the developer Edition and check the latest wonders, I first tried to upgrade using the DVD. No luck. Not enough available space, said the ( new and more elegant ) installer. I need to reinstall then.
My setup is a little special since I have put all my data in a ZFS mirrored pool made of only one slice of my internal disk and an USB external disk that I connect now and then to my laptop to resilver so that I can keep a copy of my data at home.
Pool Extra = mirror (c0d0s7, c1t0d0p0)
I installed the Developer Edition without the smallest problem. I didn’t look very carefully, though and the installer reformatted my internal disk. No problem, I had expected to lose that branch anyway, I still have the external submirror. BUT when I plug it in, I get a nice error message :
The extra pool cannot be imported due to a wrong vdev configuration.
So Solaris sees that there is a pool available within my external disk but refuses to import it! After some worrying minutes during which anyone would start to like working with tape drives, I found the solution. During the reformatting of my internal disk, the installer had created a slice 7 with another size and had created a UFS filesystem on it. I guess that that was what confused zpool…
Removing slice 7 with format and reconnecting my external disk made my pool finally importable. I could then detach my internal slice from the pool and then recreate it.
Interestingly, my pool now occupies the entire capacity of my external disk while it was before limited to my internal slice’s capacity. I’ll need some extra tricks to get my mirror back…
Never underestimate an upgrade….
T:
ZFS