I attempted to install arch linux with zfs on an older hard drive i had. After encountering a lot of issues, i gave up and decided to just use ext4 instead. Arch is running fine now, but I believe I unknowingly added my other 3tb storage drive to the zpool when trying to set it up. If i look at the partitions on the 3tb drive with gparted, it tells me its type is zfs member. The original partition type was exFAT. i used fsck.exfat to attempt to rescue the drive. It found 3 errors and corrected 2. The last error says bad cluster 0 while reading root directory. I tried badblocks, but it found no errors. I used testdisk and it can read some of the files, but after I write to the drive and reboot, nothing changes. Also, somehow gparted reads my main drive with arch installed as zfs member instead of ext4. Arch boots just fine and I have no issues with it other than that. gdisk and fdisk both read the drive with arch installed perfectly.
Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
- Backup everything
- Boot from a live DVD/USB
- Nuke the partition tables of both drives with DD
- Reinstall OS
- Restore data from backup
If you can get your 3Tb storage drive to a readable state, BACK IT UP before rebooting.
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Do you need to recover data from the 3TB drive? There are tools that will recover the data if the partition table is corrupted, but you lose file names.