Importing a Pool With an Alternate Root Location

Pools can also be imported using an alternate root location. This feature allows for recovery situations, where the mount points should not be interpreted in context of the current root mount point, but under some temporary directory where repairs can be performed. This feature also can be used when you are mounting removable media as described in the preceding section.

In the following example, a pool called morpheus is imported with /mnt as the alternate root mount point. This example assumes that morpheus was previously exported.

$ zpool import -R /a pool
$ zpool list morpheus
NAME   SIZE   ALLOC  FREE    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
pool  44.8G    78K  44.7G     0%  ONLINE  /a
$ zfs list pool
NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
pool  73.5K  44.1G    21K  /a/pool