I have a pc with a few hard drives that used to be in old linux mint machines i since tore down and rebuilt. I am struggling to fund the exact command that is gonna let this pc mount them, it also is running a linux mint setup, but this seems to mess with some stuff; because the kernel versions are different on the other drive I’m trying to mount, and theyre both root pools, the commands im finding dont work, and I’m still a bit of a linux baby (maybe 1-2 years in from even hearing about linux), so a lot of the nuance is unfortunately still pretty lost on me. If anyone could help me get this data off the drive so i can wipe it (the OS somehow got messed up and i can’t boot it directly), I’d appreciate any help. I also know i dont have any logs or info directly, but I dont know what to even post, so please ask for more info if you think you’ll need it to help me.
Not sure on the setup, so a/b
A: current machine has its own boot&root drive, in which case, plug the older source drive in, and use zpool import with the -N (which is Capital N) and it should import the pool but not mounted. Then you can change the Mount point of the dataset with the data you want, to a /mnt/ or other Mount point, to retrieve the data.
B: you want to use the drive with zfs on root to run the system… I don’t have any help on this, sorry, others might? I guess you tried what you could? Is there a particular point it stopped? Or did it even get past bios/POST?
You would import the pool to an alternate location or alternate root. The reason for the alternate location is because it would overwrite your current OS root.
zpool import -R /mnt root
So the pool would get mounted to /mnt/root
https://illumos.org/books/zfs-admin/advanced.html#gbcgl
Of course you won’t be able to boot to this directly. You will boot to the new root pool, this command just allows you to mount the old disks and move data. That’s why data pool should be separate from root pool and now you would be able just to move disks and zpool import the data pool which wouldn’t interfere with the root pool which is the OS.