The rack had just come back online after an outage. Most things looked fine — VMs booted, the network reconverged, monitoring caught up on the missed intervals. Then I ran zpool status on one of the TrueNAS SCALE nodes and saw output I hadn't seen in production before.
An 11-disk RAIDZ1 vdev. Multiple drives marked as faulted. One member listed as removed. The pool itself in SUSPENDED state.
The reflex, in that moment, is to start replacing disks. That reflex is wrong — at least as the first move. This piece is how I got the pool back online without touching a single drive, and what I learned about how ZFS reports failure states along the way.
The pool in question is on my TrueNAS SCALE machine, which runs alongside a separate CORE box on a different chassis. The recovery pattern is the same on either — this isn't SCALE-specific ZFS behaviour — but the incident happened on SCALE, so that's where the console output in this piece comes from. For privacy, I'll refer to the affected pool as MediaPool-A.
// what the console showed
