Remove device without device being present

[hykilpikonna]

My question is also asked here: https://superuser.com/questions/1829011/bcachefs-remove-device-without-mounting-or-mount-with-device-offline

Using bcachefs (Arch Linux 6.7.2), how can I remove a non-existent device without the device being present?

The X-problem is:

• I've added a test drive to my daily drive using bcachefs device add
• I never wrote anything to it after adding the drive.
• I forgot to remove the test drive, unplugged it and formatted it for something else. The bcachefs headers on the test drive no longer exist.
• Now I rebooted my system, and my daily drive cannot mount.

Running mount or bcachefs mount would result in the following in dmesg:

bcachefs: bch2_fs_open() bch_fs_open err opening /dev/sda: insufficient_devices_to_start

Running mount -o very_degraded did allow it to be mounted. However, when I tried to remove the device, the following commands gave the following errors:

[matthiasgoergens]

I have a similar problem. But I don't even manage to mount:

When I am trying to mount via mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt I get: insufficient_devices_to_start. Passing -o degraded, or -o very_degraded,force etc doesn't change that error message.

ERROR - bcachefs::commands::mount: Fatal error: Invalid argument/dev/nvme0n1p3: insufficient_devices_to_start

UPDATE: after restarting my boot-from-rescue-system a few times and trying again, I managed to mount degraded. Something is probably wrong with my SSD.

[koverstreet]

i'll have to make those error messages more informative