To kill or not to kill

About 2 weeks ago I attempted to import a pool (4x 500GB SATA drives) with zvol based slogs devices that were having issues in b134 after repeated hard crashes due to power issues. This attempt was done using a live Open Indiana DVD, after I imported the first two pools on the system I executed the import of the pool that I hoped would complete successfully this time. Even though It failed with the older versions.

Well not knowing or expecting that this import would take more than an hour or two, perhaps a day, I didn’t do anything to prepare the system to be in a state that would allow for monitoring theimport process. It was booted into text console as opposed to the default X gui based console, and sshd was not started. Thus I had no way to monitor the system that was stuck in the kernel, it appears to be progressing the disk activity was sporadic, barely noticeable only by the blink of the amber LED, some blinks were just a quick flash occasionally some were a flash that lasted a bit longer sometimes they occurred every couple seconds, some time they go 5 or 6 seconds between brief flashes but since the system was running on a live image with no writes or reads to hard disks to light up the disk access LED so it obviously working on the command I gave it, I had even pressed ctrl-z in hopes of pausing the command in a way that it could restarted in the background later and giving me the chance to run a command or two to monitor the system progress or at least what is happening going on. 

But two weeks later the process continues only giving me two options, let it continue trying to work its magic and hopefully end successfully and giving me the chance to remote the zvol based slog devices from the pool or even just get a copy of the contents of the pool stored on valid pool or a different system with the required space. Or do I give up and shut down the box only to start it a way that would give me the chance to monitor the process and/or remove some zvol’s that aren’t par t of the pool hopefully speeding the process the next time in hopes of speeding the process.

I guess I will let it go for a few more days in hope that it will at least show some sign of completing shortly,