Reformatting a disk from a ZFS pool

[Paradroid]

Nas4free has been working great for me, but I need to install Windows on the box to run a few things I can't do with nas4free. I have a 3x2TB RAID-Z ZFS pool. What I want to do is:

1. Take a drive out of the pool, pool runs in degraded mode
2. Reformat the disk as FAT, copy all data off the pool to the FAT disk
3. Install windows
4. Use drive bender/flexraid etc ...

The problem I have is at step 2. I can remove the drive and the pool still works, but I cannot reformat the disk. If I put the disk back in, it just becomes part of the pool again. ZFS commands won't allow me to remove it.

The only idea i can think of is to put the drive in an external USB case so the system sees it as a different drive, and then format and copy off the data from the pool. Is there a better way?

[rostreich]

The only idea i can think of is to put the drive in an external USB case so the system sees it as a different drive,

will not work!

ZFS writes metadata 3x on different locations on your disk.
this is a GPT partition, which cannot be easily removed as it is a security feature.

you could use DBAN from UBCD or active killdisk free for windows to overwrite everything with zeroes on the disk and then you can reformat your disk.

but I don' t really understand why you would force a pool to degraded state. just buy another disk for this windows purpose or am I missing the point?

[Paradroid]

Thanks. Actually, it did work. The pool is degraded but it is only temporary while I copy the files to the standalone disk.

The reason I want to do it is I want to remove Nas4Free to install Windows - basically rebuild the machine with a new OS and storage. Then run Nas4Free in a VM on Windows.