I/O device error when trying to remove drive

[Desk]

Can anyone please provide some guidance regarding the following?

 

I currently have five hard drives within my drivepool, housed in a microserver, totalling 16TB.

 

However, I have received an alert via Drivescanner warning me that one of them, a 3TB drive, might be heading towards failure - let's call if Drive F.

 

When I try to remove Drive F from the pool it gets to the stage of migrating the files before telling me it cannot proceed due to an I/O device error. However, the content of Drive F *has* dropped down from 2.72TB to 700GB, so some migration appears to have occurred.

 

I know that I can force Drive F out of the pool if it comes to that, but I don't know what happens to the files on it. Are the files self-contained, or shared across the other drives in the pool? Would I be left with only parts of a file - both on Drive F and in the remainder of the pool?

 

Drive F is currently showing as having about 700GB of material on it.

 

Across the rest of the pool, I've freed up 2.74TB of free space. And what I've started to do is look to remove the files which are listed as being on Drive F out of the drivepool and onto non-drivepool areas of the remaining four hard drives. 

 

Is this the best approach? Once all those files are moved by me, should I then be able to force Drive F out of the pool without losing anything? I guess one of the issues might be that the files listed as being on Drive F may only be *parts* of a file? Would 2.74TB be enough to take the parts off Drive F as well as the remainder of those files which are spread across the rest of the pool?

 

One further quirk which has developed is that one of my shared folders is coming up as not being accessible either in the general Drivepool Drive or via Drive F, but I can get into it on the other drives in the pool. 

 

Any advice very gratefully received.

 

Best,

 

Desk

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I've deleted the other post, as this is a DrivePool specific question and not as much Scanner related.  So to keep everything in one thread, rather than potentially split between two... 

 

 

 

 

That said, I'm sorry to hear about the problem drive! 

 

 

 

For the drive removal, the "Force Damaged Disk Removal" option will skip files that generate errors and continue removing the drive.  It will leave the remaining files on the drive, which you can then access and attempt to move off yourself. 

 

Additionally, if the entire pool (or at least the data on the drive) is duplicated, then you can use the "duplicate data later" option when removing the disk, or even just physically remove the drive.  Then let StableBit DrivePool reduplicate the data. 

 

 

Alternative, you could use the balancing engine to do this, as it may have more luck. 

To do this, open up the balancer settings and then the balancers tab, and open up the "Drive Usage Limiter" balancer. Uncheck both the duplicated and unduplicated options for the disk in question.

[Desk]

I've deleted the other post, as this is a DrivePool specific question and not as much Scanner related.  So to keep everything in one thread, rather than potentially split between two... 

 

 

 

 

That said, I'm sorry to hear about the problem drive! 

 

 

 

For the drive removal, the "Force Damaged Disk Removal" option will skip files that generate errors and continue removing the drive.  It will leave the remaining files on the drive, which you can then access and attempt to move off yourself. 

 

Additionally, if the entire pool (or at least the data on the drive) is duplicated, then you can use the "duplicate data later" option when removing the disk, or even just physically remove the drive.  Then let StableBit DrivePool reduplicate the data. 

 

 

Alternative, you could use the balancing engine to do this, as it may have more luck. 

To do this, open up the balancer settings and then the balancers tab, and open up the "Drive Usage Limiter" balancer. Uncheck both the duplicated and unduplicated options for the disk in question.

Thanks for this - I realised I'd posted in the Drivescanner forum by mistake, but then couldn't work out how to delete that post.

 

Unfortunately, none of the material on the problem drive is duplicated.

 

From what you're saying, it seems that I could just force Drive F out of the pool and all non-problematic files should remain there, self-contained and still accessible (just no longer part of the pool?)

 

If so, this might be easier than me personally trying to migrate the files off Drive F by grabbing them out of the Pool Drive and moving them onto drives outside of the pool.

 

I'll give this a go and keep my fingers crossed.

 

Thanks again,

 

Desk

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Correct. 

 

When using the "Force Damage Drive Removal", it skips "problem files" and removes the drive from the pool.

You'll see a "PoolPart.xxxxx" folder on the drive, and a folder structure that mirrors the pool (it may only be partial, as .. it only had part of the pool on it).   From there , you can copy the files back into the pool manually, if needed. (or to another folder). 

[Desk]

Correct.

 

When using the "Force Damage Drive Removal", it skips "problem files" and removes the drive from the pool.

You'll see a "PoolPart.xxxxx" folder on the drive, and a folder structure that mirrors the pool (it may only be partial, as .. it only had part of the pool on it). From there , you can copy the files back into the pool manually, if needed. (or to another folder).

 

I've hit a problem, in that I can't find an option with this version of Drivepool to force a drive out of the pool.

 

I'm running version 1.2.7226 as an add-in to the Windows Home Server.

 

It's telling me I can update. Do I need to do this in order to get a version where I can force out a hard drive, and is there any chance that updating the software now could make my problems with this drive even worse?

 

Desk

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, you'd need to upgrade to the 1.3 version to get the "force damaged drive removal".

Or uninstall and reinstall the 2.X x64 version, if you want. 

 

You can use the balancer part though