Exchange a broken hard drive in a running ZFS pool

If one of your hard drives dies on your FreeBSD server, you need to format the new hard disk in the exactly same layout as the existing/previous disk was formatted. Last time when one of my hard drives started failing, I used the following steps to match up the partition layout between the new and the old (still working) hard drive.

First I figured out the layout of the existing hard disk (in this case ada1)

gpart show ada1
=>        34  3907029101  ada1  GPT  (1.8T)
          34           6        - free -  (3.0K)
          40         128     1  freebsd-boot  (64K)
         168     8388608     2  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)
     8388776  3898640352     3  freebsd-zfs  (1.8T)
  3907029128           7        - free -  (3.5K)

Then I created the GPT on the new disk (ada0):

gpart create -s gpt ada0

Add the boot section:

gpart add -b 40 -s 128 -t freebsd-boot ada0

Set the boot code:

gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ada0

Create the swap partition:

gpart add -s 8388608 -t freebsd-swap -l swap10 ada0

Add the ZFS partition:

gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l disk10 ada0

Then take the disk online:

zpool online tank /dev/ada0p3

And finally start resilvering:

zpool replace tank /dev/ada0p3

That’s it.
iss