Background:

I starting playing with ZFS pools. 

- Started with 3 old 4TB drives in raidz1. 
- One of the 3 drives failed out.

- I destroyed the pool to get the bad drive out.

- I built a new mirrored pool with the 2 good drives. 

- Didn't format the drives so it basically imported the two zfs drives and set up a raidz1 pool.

- Took me a couple of tries to notice what was going on

- destroyed pool. removed partitions on drives. 

- created 2 drive mirrored pool. 

At this point I started a pre-clear on the bad drive to see if it's bad, and yes, it is, it's puking all over the syslog. No problem there; expected that. 

I started the array. 

Started successfully.

Told me I need to format the new pool. 

I checked the box and hit the button. 

 I've been sitting here for about an hour with zero disk activity. 



Diagnostics attached. Any help is appreciated. 
 

tower-diagnostics-20250424-0835.zip

There's nothing logged after trying to create the partition:

 

Apr 24 08:46:09 Tower emhttpd: writing GPT on disk (sdm), with partition 1 byte offset 32KiB, erased: 0
Apr 24 08:46:09 Tower emhttpd: shcmd (1153): sgdisk -Z /dev/sdm

 

Try rebooting, then click on the first pool device, click erase pool, then try again to format and post new diags if it still fails

Roger. I'm going to wait for an active pre-clear to finish. Is the format waiting on the pre-clear to finish? 

That could be the issue, it may be trying to do a sync.

As soon as the pre-clear finished, the format happened. All good!