Remove portable USB single disk zpool after disk died

TrueNAS General
1

I have a FreeNAS 13-STABLE installation. I actually had two servers 1000 miles (1600 km) apart. Several years ago, it was faster to copy data between the two by copying the data to a 2 TB external USB disk and throwing it in the car. I set up the USB drive as a single device zpool. A few years later, I lost one location and both machines ended up in the same location a few years ago. I didn’t bother to look at the USB drive for a long time.

When I looked, it is hard dead. It won’t read on either system. That’s fine. It was just an old copy of data for a backup.

The pools UI shows:

WDBackup73RV UNAVAIL

Because zfs cannot access the pool, when I try to do anything in the UI with jails, I get:

“ZFSException

cannot open ‘WDBackup73RV’: pool I/O is currently suspended”

The Jails UI page never loads the list of jails I have on this machine.

I’ve been searching for others who have this type of problem for a while now. My search-fu is not strong this week.

I have tried to remove the pool via the UI and the command line without success. The commands seem to never return.

Is it possible to destroy a pool which has no live devices?

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What I’ve found usually works is to reboot the system with the stuck pool. When the system comes back, try zpool export -f WDBackup73RV to forcibly export the stuck pool. You’ll then need to delete all the jails pointing to that pool.

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Well, it looks like I had not tried a reboot… duh. After the reboot, without the USB drive connected, it was possible to remove the pool from the UI.

Thank you!

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