FreeBSD 15 ZFS Pool Import Fails After Reboot

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Critical datasets remain offline after boot, causing application outages.

Environment & Reproduction

Seen after abrupt shutdown, HBA renumbering, or stale hostid metadata.

sudo zpool import

Root Cause Analysis

Pool appears active elsewhere or device mapping changed so normal import fails.

Quick Triage

Inspect pool status and verify all member devices are present.

sudo camcontrol devlist

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

List import candidates and check host ownership warnings.

sudo zpool import -D

Solution – Primary Fix

Import with appropriate recovery flags and clear stale host ownership records.

sudo zpool import -f -R /mnt 

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Use read-only import first to validate integrity before mounting production datasets.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

zpool status shows ONLINE and datasets mount with expected properties.

Rollback Plan

Export pool and revert to prior boot environment or hardware path mapping.

Prevention & Hardening

Enable clean shutdown policy and monitor device path stability.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Related to ZFS cachefile drift and degraded vdev metadata issues.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for freebsd-15.

View all freebsd-15 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

OpenZFS administration guide for pool import recovery.