Allineedis

Just wanted to report back that the “transplant” was successful. After the backup of the healthy machine was finished, I pulled all the drives. Moved the drives from the failed machine to the healthy one. Started the machine and voila there was the other pool. Driveletter was different, so I cannot comment if that would have been an issue. The only warning I received was that some paths were different. I clicked fix and a couple of seconds later all was OK.

Uhhh...good one and to be honest I do not know the driveletter of the one that gave up. I am now making a backup of the pool on the healthy one and once that is done I will just try.

Hi, I have 2 basically identical “Servers” running Drivepool. On one of them my OS drive just died. Can I take the drives from the failed machine and put them to the healthy one? My plan was to remove the drives from the healthy one and put the drives from the failed one in the healthy one. Will Drivepool recognize the pool, although it is not the pool belonging to the Healthy machine? I think it will, but it is risky to simply test and would be great if someone could confirm. I will not replace the OS drive On the failed one, since the final plan is to consolidate all drives into one machine and downsize. Thanks.

So, after several days of duplicating and balancing all is back to normal again. Just to double check. I use the disk space equalizer plugin to equally distribute files by percentage. Drivepool has finished this process now. Am I OK by disabling all plugins and leave the distribution to Drivepool? Only plugin I would leave active is the Scanner plugin.

Hey drashna, sorry for the delay, but had the flu for a couple of days. The drive actually failed. It was a Seagate Barracuda (ST3000DM001). It eventually hit 250+ unreadable sectors. Funny that the count sometimes went up and down again with 8 sectors. Drive is now removed, sadly lost a few files which could not be repaired. Not a big issue, I just re-rip them from the original disks. Was probably a coincedence that the drive failed at the moment of first removal, which tricked me to believe it was a false positive. I am using several balancing plugins (in that order). Drive usage limiter (set to put only duplicated files on certain drives) Stablebit scanner (pretty much default settings) Duplication Space Optimizer Disk Space Equalizer (equalize by percent all file types) Noticed that the drive usage limiter allows also unduplicated files on drives that are set to only have duplicated files. The server is currently balancing so maybe it will solve itself, but it will take a few days. The server holds 50+ TB of data. Will report back

OK, Drivepool solved my 3TB issue. Weird thing happend. I inserted the drive into a different server and it was recoginized right away with the correct size. A bit odd that I had issues with the server where it originated from. I did not restart in that one, so maybe that was the issue. The SMART warnings on the other drive went up (decided for a full scan to see if the first warning would go away). Scanner kicked in and started to evacuate files from that drive, but noticed another weird thing, that Drivepool is actually writing data to the failing drive (Scanner plug-in set to move files out of damaged drives). I watched this behaviour for 20 minutes and decided to resume force removal.

Pulling my hair out, the last few I still have :-). First question. Bought several 8TB drives. In order to have bays available I started to remove several of my 3TB drives. The first went OK an swapped it with the 8TB drive. The second gave an error when removing, due to IO error!? Shortly after the scanner returned 16 unreadable sectors and that this drive was overheating (34 C). Could this be a false positive? There was a lot of IO during the swapping of the drives, maybe the controller choked? Drivepool is currently force removing the drive. Am I doing the right thing or should I first scan the whole disk? Second question. The 3TB drives will be used in a different server an I usually go in to disk management and delete the current volume and create a new simple volume without path and driveletter when moving drives. Apparently I was not paying attention and am now stuck with a 2048 GB drive. I am not seeing a 768 GB unallocated part. Went into diskpart and even there the drive has a max capacity of 2047 GB. tried "clean", "convert to gpt" but no success (diskpart states that it performed requested actions successfully). When listing the volumes it states there are no volumes. With Seatools I only have the Basic checks option (using an external e-sata hot swap bay). I know Drivepool can handle this drive since it was showing as 3TB drive and it worked perfectly for almost 2 years. Currently it does not even recognize the drive. I googled extensivley, but only end up at results that I already have tried. Is there a way to reset a drive to its factory settings? Maybe one of you guys have a trick. Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Drashna, thank you for your detailed explanation. This cleared a few assumptions I had, which were incorrect. I am using the latest stable build on 3 WHS 2011 servers, all 3 have also the Scanner software installed. So I am well armed I guess. I just migrated from 1.3 to 2.1.1.561 and have not fully checked all new settings. I simply installed all plug-ins I knew from 1.3. You are referring to the 3rd tab under balancing I guess, if so I have to check that out. I agree with thw "white whale" analogy. If I look back, I cannot really remember that I ever had anything go magically corrupt. There are occasions , but that is always down to software glitches (file was generated incorrectly), hardware failures (drives starting to fail) user error (in my case usually impatience which stops a process which should not have stopped).

File limiter plug-in I just got my first 8TB drive and since I am not sure how it will hold up and the supposed write penalty I thought why not only use it for duplicated data. My reasoning was duplication is written once, maybe twice in case something changes and thats it. So this would be optimal for this type of drive. Also if it dies prematurely, I only loose duplicated data. So I ticked the box "duplicated" on the 8TB drive and all others I only ticked the "unduplicated" boxes. So far so good, but I am also seeing duplicated data on other drives (light blu on the bars). Is this normal or not? I was expecting to only see duplicated data appear on the 8TB drive. Prior to adding this drive I had no duplication set. Does this choice of limiting the duplication data to the 8TB drive make sense? Or am I better of to reset the file placement plug-in to its defaults and forget about it? File corruption What happens to a duplicated file when it becomes corrupt? For example, I copy a file to drivepool (100% OK). I let it duplicate, also fine. Now for some reason one of those files becomes corrupt. Will drivepool correct this by replacing the corrupt version with the second still OK version or worse case will it replace the OK version with the corrupt one, or a totally different scenario? Just curious how this works and wondering if duplication not only safeguards against data loss, but also against degradation.

Also solved the trial question by simply buying another license. It's Christmas an Drivepool is worth every penny :-).

OK, figured out the second part. Apparently I screwed up my admin pw. Since the machines still recognized me when logging in remotley, I did set up 3 new administrator accounts only for Drivepool and they work perfectly now. For the first part I clicked on trial mode to see if it all would work. What happens after the trial? I am not planning, not yet at least, to use drivepool on my regular PC. So will I be able to use the PC to remote access after the trial? Or will it shutdown?

Sorry, to resurrect this old thread, but it actually contained the exact answer I was looking for. I upgraded my 3 servers all running on WHS2011 from 1.3 to the current 2.1 build. All went smooth and I was thinking why I did not do this earlier, but OK. Two things I either don't understand or just can't get working are first how to connect to my servers without having to open the WHS2011 dashboard. I am trying to connect from my regular PC which is not running any Stablebit software. I tried the suggestion in the above post , but I get the expected message that my machine is not known in combination with the activation code. Also felt a bit like trying to cheat :-). I am only looking to control them without having to use the WHS2011 Dashboards. Secondly, when I am in the UI in the WHS2011 Dasboard and I want to switch between servers, it keeps asking for administrator rights. What login is required? I tried the one that I use to remote connect to the WHS2011 machine, but no luck there.

I will send the license info to you guys. But for now I am kinda stuck. The pool has finished balancing. But still it looks like I have lost well over a hundred large files. What baffles me is that if I check drives where that movies are located, what I am seeing makes no sense. As an example, one of my 4 TB drive, has used 2.7 TB of it's capacity. When checking the drive directly the total size of the pool part folder is only roughly 60 GB. So where is the remaining 2.^ TB. This is a new drive. I have the option of show hidden files enabled, even checked the option to show hidden system files. All this has started after adding 3 new drives and subsequent balancing. So I am hoping that the data (movies) are still on the drives, but drive-pool nor windows does not know how to access them? Or am I just rambling now? :-) Another weird thing. Under the scanner, I have a Samsung 1TB drive showing as 2.00TB ? I am lost, is there some logfile or something else that I can send that would help to make sense?

OK, thanks for the respons. Did that. And it seemed to work, but now I have the following issues: It won't accept my license key. I have 3 keys and they are identical. I tried capital or non capital letters. For now I activated the 30 day trial. Sure this will be solved. Who do I have to contact? It appears that I "miss" quite some data. Although it appears that it is misplaced? For example in my Movie folder, I have a folder for the movie Royal Tennenbaums. In this folder there is no movie file located anymore only an xml file and a few jpegs. If I search for Tennenbaums in Windows Eplorer it finds the movie file as well. When trying to play the movie the player returns "No file found". Weird is also that under the properties of that mkv file the size under general is 0bytes and under details 29.3 GB (same as in Windows Explorer). This is the case for 101 movies. I started balancing in the hope that that solves it. How can I check and solve this further?

Did some further digging and found that on that drive (K:) there were 2 pool-part folders. One 0byte and the other with data. I deleted the pool-part folder with 0bytes (had to take ownership first?). But that did not change the dash status. I also cannot remove the drive (which is part of the pool) from the pool, because of the message that the drive cannot be removed due to a missing drive. When trying to remove the drive that is flagged as missing, I get the warning that everything will be lost on that drive once I choose that option. I am currently making a back-up of the data from K, before I loose that data. Next plan would be as soon as the data is save to remove the drive from drive pool. First the "missing" one and afterwards, the one in the pool. Format the drive. and re-add it to the pool. Is that the way? Or am I missing something?