Replacing a dead disk in a zpool

After digging endlessly this night I finally found the solution. The short answer is that you can use the disks' GUIDs (which persist even after disconnecting a drive) with the zpool command.

Long answer: I got the disk's GUID using the zdb command which gave me the following output

root@zeus:/dev# zdb
hermes:
    version: 28
    name: 'hermes'
    state: 0
    txg: 162804
    pool_guid: 14829240649900366534
    hostname: 'zeus'
    vdev_children: 1
    vdev_tree:
        type: 'root'
        id: 0
        guid: 14829240649900366534
        children[0]:
            type: 'raidz'
            id: 0
            guid: 5355850150368902284
            nparity: 1
            metaslab_array: 31
            metaslab_shift: 32
            ashift: 9
            asize: 791588896768
            is_log: 0
            create_txg: 4
            children[0]:
                type: 'disk'
                id: 0
                guid: 11426107064765252810
                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP-part2'
                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/73b31683-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'
                whole_disk: 1
                create_txg: 4
            children[1]:
                type: 'disk'
                id: 1
                guid: 15935140517898495532
                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X-part2'
                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/746c949a-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'
                whole_disk: 1
                create_txg: 4
            children[2]:
                type: 'disk'
                id: 2
                guid: 7183706725091321492
                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS-part2'
                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/7541115a-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'
                whole_disk: 1
                create_txg: 4
            children[3]:
                type: 'disk'
                id: 3
                guid: 17196042497722925662
                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C-part2'
                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/760a94ee-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'
                whole_disk: 1
                create_txg: 4
    features_for_read:

The GUID I was looking for is 15935140517898495532 which enabled me to do

root@zeus:/dev# zpool offline hermes 15935140517898495532
root@zeus:/dev# zpool status
  pool: hermes
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices has been taken offline by the administrator.
        Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
        degraded state.
action: Online the device using 'zpool online' or replace the device with
        'zpool replace'.
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 2h4m with 0 errors on Sun Jun  9 00:28:24 2013
config:

        NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        hermes                       DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1-0                   DEGRADED     0     0     0
            ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X  OFFLINE      0     0     0
            ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

and then

root@zeus:/dev# zpool replace hermes 15935140517898495532 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500320AS_9QM03ATQ
root@zeus:/dev# zpool status
  pool: hermes
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
  scan: resilver in progress since Sun Jun  9 01:44:36 2013
    408M scanned out of 419G at 20,4M/s, 5h50m to go
    101M resilvered, 0,10% done
config:

        NAME                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        hermes                          DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1-0                      DEGRADED     0     0     0
            ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP     ONLINE       0     0     0
            replacing-1                 OFFLINE      0     0     0
              ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X   OFFLINE      0     0     0
              ata-ST3500320AS_9QM03ATQ  ONLINE       0     0     0  (resilvering)
            ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

After resilvering had been completed everything worked well again. It would have been nice to include this information, that you can use a disk's GUID obtained through zdb with the zpool command, with the manpage of zpool.

Edit

As pointed out by durval below the zdb command may not output anything. Then you may try to use

zdb -l /dev/<name-of-device>

to explicitly list information about the device (even if it already is missing from the system).

The issue is the disks are referenced by ids and not by device.

Here is a workaround that should work:

ln -s /dev/null /dev/ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X
zpool export hermes
zpool import hermes
zpool status
# note the new device name that should appear here
zpool offline hermes xxxx
zpool replace hermes xxxx /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500320AS_9QM03ATQ

Edit: I was 30 seconds late ...

@Marcus: Thanks for posting this excellent answer to your own question, it helped me a lot.

The other day I found a twist that might interest you (and anyone else that comes here a-googling in the future): I had a cache device that was dropped from the pool (and marked as "UNAVAIL") due to this same error (ZFS-8000-4J, "label is missing or invalid"), and trying to offline/remove/replace it failed with exactly the same "no such device in pool" message.

BUT, when I tried to apply your solution, plain "zdb" (with no arguments) did not list the device, much less its GUID.

After some digging, I found that "zdb -l /dev/DEVICENAME" listed the GUID (taking it directly from the device, and not from the pool records), and using that GUID enabled me to do the replacement (actually I did a "zpool offline" followed by a "zpool remove" and then a "zpool add", which worked perfectly).