Trouble with ZFS switch

[dewarrn1]

I'm trying to get a new system's /usr slice swapped over to zfs and running into all kinds of trouble. I followed Pavel's directions (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide) to get the zpool set up and everything seems to work fine. I dropped into single-user mode and did a tar operation to copy over everything from the current user slice to the appropriate chunk of the zpool, switched on ZFS_enable in rc.conf, set up the mountpoint as per Pavel's instructions, commented out the old slice's mounting instructions in /etc/fstab, and rebooted.

ZFS definitely comes up, but it doesn't seem to mount the pool correctly; I'm left without a prompt as the system says it can't find the ttys. It's particularly annoying because I have this working elsewhere, but I can't remember what the magic step is. Do I need to export? Import? Did my tar operation miss some important stuff somehow? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also, being able to search the forums for "ZFS" would be nice; any chance of an exception to the too-short-to-search rule? Thanks in advance!

[phoenix]

Scroll up the screen, and you'll probably see something along the lines of "can't load pool as it was previously accessed by another system".

You're supposed to be able to fix this by:
* booting into single-user mode
* mounting / read/write using mount -u /
* force import of pool using zpool import -f <nameofpool>
* do a proper export of pool
* do a proper import of pool
* rebooting

However, I've never been able to figure out the exact correct order of steps to do this. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

What I've taken to doing, and it's a real hack, is to edit /etc/rc.d/zfs and add a zpool import -f <nameofpool> to the start() function. This works if the disk in the pool will only ever be used in this server, which is how all my systems are currently setup. We don't move pools from system to system.

[dewarrn1]

Good tip, that seemed to do the trick. Thanks Phoenix!