Solaris: Delete ZFS slices from a disk

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From the computer of: mind (1 recipe)
Created: Feb 15, 2008     Updated: Feb 17, 2008

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You know ZFS, it is really cool, you can have tons of filesystems in a zpool, you can create raidz/mirror/stripes with just one command, it has compression, quotas and every other cool feature that you can thought about. But what happens if you have to move a ZFS disk to a Solaris 8/9 system?

Long story short:
An old E450 that works a production server with solaris9 with a 9 gigs mirror with a failed disk, an E250 running solaris10 and zfs with a 9 gigs scsi disk that will suit perfectly in the 450.
We took the disk an plugged in to 450 and tried to recreate the mirror

It turned out that the disk was labeled with EFI type, and hasn't a slice2, but has a slice8, and so the mirror won't be recreated.

Format could not handle that disk, we could not delete slice 8 because '8 is not expected'...
After a bit of googling we found the stuff about EFI Vs. VTOC labels. If you want to use a ZFS'ed disk on an older system you've to convert the labels using:

and then relabel the disk and choose "0" at the Label prompt:

Now you can just partition your drive with format or use prtvtoc and fmthard.