fleggett1
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Posts posted by fleggett1
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Well, some more info. It's now at the brink of dawn here and I can't sleep, so I'm back at the computer. Scanner completed the scan on that dropped-out drive. Thinking I might be able to salvage the drive via a power cycle, I rebooted the system a second time and, this time, Windows found and fixed whatever filesystem problem it had encountered earlier. Why it didn't do that during the first reboot is anyone's guess. I have no idea if any actual files were affected nor, for that matter, which drive was repaired since Windows is stubborn about releasing such obviously critical information to the user. I know in the old manual chkdsk days that recovered files would be saved in a FOUND.000 directory, but I don't see anything like that. Maybe that's a good thing, but all this weirdness with intermittent SMART errors and out-of-the-blue filesystem problems is making me go more than a little batty.
In any event, after the second reboot, the drive reappeared in the pool, thank the Gods. I don't know why the drive dropped in the first place and I suspect I'll never know, but I figured a follow-up was in order.
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This question might already be answered, but I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown with this system and could use some help along with a hefty bit of hand-holding.
Had to restart the system today because Windows claimed there was a filesystem error that needed fixing. I have NO idea what drive it was referring to and, to make matters even more mysterious, no check happened upon reboot. However, when the system did reboot, Drivepool said that a drive was missing and no longer part of my pool.
A big drive. An important drive. A drive storing terabytes of data.
Upon looking at Drivepool, I identified the drive that had dropped out and then looked at what Scanner was doing. It was scanning the disk and still is given its size. The thing is, Scanner isn't reporting anything wrong with it. It can read the drive info, is reporting the sector map, there are no SMART warnings, and everything looks hunky-dory.
So, has Scanner put the drive into some sort of "It's mine and no one else can touch it!" mode? Windows' own disk management isn't even reading the drive correctly, which has me REALLY concerned.
The scan is probably going to take all night to complete and I don't want to abort it in case it really does need a complete read.
So...help?
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Oooohhhh, you're talking about a card with eSATA ports. Unfortunately, that's something way above my pay grade, as I've never fiddled with eSATA stuff. Maybe Chris might know something. Perhaps try using whatever driver Server 2022 pulls down for it instead of the Tempo driver?
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Ugh, you're killing me, man, just killing me. I really had my heart set on that thing.
SUPPOSEDLY, the enclosure presents drives to Windows as if they were directly connected to an HBA and/or the motherboard itself. I don't think it even requires additional drivers. I don't know what sort of demon sacrifices it's performing in order to do that over a simple USB cable, but if it's true, you'd still have doubts?
I won't be using it in a (software) RAID configuration. JBoD is the most my arthritic brain can handle. RAID is like forcing me to use a third pedal in my automatic car.
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Well, it just happened again and disappeared just as quick. Arrggh. I guess I will have to setup email notifications after all.
Are these incidents logged ANYWHERE that's human readable?
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Does DP/Scanner work with practically any external enclosure, particularly as it relates to SMART reporting? I suspect my aging Norco is in its twilight and I'm probably going to have to redo the entire system in the next month or so. I have 10 drives with the intent of getting more when prices are more favorable, but ran into the issue of finding a case that has the room along with an associated PSU with enough power leads (I don't want to resort to one of those cables with five power connectors that could cause a house fire).
To that end, I was eyeing this cute little beast:
https://sabrent.com/products/ds-uctb
(The 10-bay version.)
Should this work will full pooling and reporting functionality? If not, does anyone have any suggestions for an alternative that's NOT a rackmount chassis?
Thanks in advance!
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I think I'm gonna call the tray icon from now on the "Gold Shield of Worry" (GSoW). Kinda goes along with Blue Screen of Death and Red Ring of Death, only with less Death.
Thanks, Christopher, for the likely answer. Still hasn't occurred again (thank God). I've already lost a bunch of drives over 2022 and didn't need this on the very first damn week of 2023.
VapechiK, it's good to share misery, even if it is, y'know, misery. I'm actually on the verge of swapping-out my entire system, as I suspect my creaky Norco has been slow-roasting my drives for the better part of five years. Then again, I did modify it to support an AIO and probably blocked some critical airflow in the process.
Never let me borrow a dremel.
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Well, I found some logs in \ProgramData\StableBit Scanner\Service\Logs and looked at all of them, but didn't see anything that indicated a drive was homiciding itself. I used search terms like "predict", "heat", "failure", and "imminent", but no joy.
I also stumbled across the \ProgramData\StableBit Scanner\Service\ErrorReports directory, but all the files are encrypted, so that was a bust.
Can I chalk this up to poltergeists or some other spooky late Halloween shenanigans? I looked at the drive again in Scanner and it reports green across the board.
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I'm running Windows 10 using the recently updated versions of Scanner and Drivepool. About an hour ago, I got the dreaded gold shield in the tray stating that a drive was going bad and was predicted to completely fail within 24 hours.
Wonderful. So, I open Scanner, look at the drive, and everything looks normal. Not a single SMART value out of line. No bad sectors reported. Drive reports as healthy.
I'm confuzzled and a little weirded out. What could cause this? Is this drive really going bad or was it some transient issue that has since self-corrected? I no longer see the shield icon, so there's that (at least). Does Scanner keep a logfile around somewhere about these (presumably dire) events that has more information?
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Wow, well, that's good to know. Thing is, though, that drives outside of the pool were also affected. Were they also changed by Drivepool (or Scanner)?
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Does Drivepool and/or Scanner mess with permissions? I had a drive fail recently and removed it from the pool, but suspiciously at around the same time, all my files on said pool was "reassigned" to another user. I had to go into safe mode to reclaim read/write permissions. When Drivepool does a rebalancing after a drive removal, does it do anything with the security settings of files & folders?
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Sorry for doing yet another thread necro, but I'm having "one of those days".
Got up today with Scanner reporting a smart error on one of my drives. Fortunately, it turned out to be an older 4 TB Red, which I can do without. I had already activated the plugin to automatically evacuate files in the event of a smart error.
Which it SEEMS to've done, but now I'm not sure. I managed to pull a directory listing of the failing drive and all I saw were directories, but no actual files. Is that normal? Should I be worried that some of the actual files might not've made it to the other drives in my pool?
The other odd issue which makes me wonder if the drive was truly and fully evacuated is that qBitorrent is now reporting weird i/o errors for some files. I've looked in my torrent directory and everything looks like it's there, so why would qBt be reporting such errors? My torrent directory is part of the pool.
BTW, I've tried manually removing the drive with all checkboxes unchecked and it gets to the 3.2% mark and fails.
As always, thanks in advance.
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That's excellent to hear, as I was thinking of replacing my two stone-age Supermicro HBAs:
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SASLP-MV8.php
With this Broadcom/LSI controller since it supports 16 ports on just the one card:
https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-nvme-9500-16i
Any problems I might run into?
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Outstanding. Thanks a bunch for the quick reply.
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Sorry for the threadnecro, but due to some Best Buy sales, I was able to replace the four low-capacity drives with four 16TB monsters. However, because of the way my enclosure is put together (insufficient airflow), it looks like I'm going to have to separate them due to heat issues (as reported by Scanner).
As such, I'll be repositioning these drives in my bays so that they're not immediately next to any other drives (they're low-capacity, so I'll probably just pull and retire them). This isn't gonna screw anything up, will it? Is Drivepool's drive identification bay-dependent or independent? I would think the latter, but I know some RAID configurations can get scrambled if drives aren't in their initially installed bays. I'm not doing RAID, but just want to make 100% sure.
EDIT - I should've noted that I've already added these drives to the pool. If I need to evacuate them before the reposition, I can do that.
Thanks in advance.
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Well, there have been some pretty unfortunate incidents since I last posted.
I sent the drive off to RRG. They said it was either a firmware or platter issue. $400 for the former, around $900 for the latter. And they couldn't tell me which one it is without delving into the drive, which means a repair commitment. I told them that I'd have to think it over.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. I think my system is trying to suicide itself. That 6 TB drive that had the bad sectors finally gave up the ghost. I was able to evacuate it via the Scanner plugin, but it might've been for naught. A couple of days ago, Drivepool was complaining about a missing drive (a 4 TB Red). I pulled it and tried to copy its contents on another system, but only managed to read a few megs before it quit. No smart warnings, just died. EXACTLY like the unit that started this mess.
And just tonight, yet another drive of the same make/model dropped out. I'll be pulling it tomorrow, but expect similar disappointing results. For those keeping count, that's one 6 TB HGST and three 4 TB Reds. And God only knows what shenanigans the following days will provide.
I'm at a crossroads with my box. One or two drive failures I could handle. Three is pushing it. Four in the span of just a few weeks has just-about driven me over the edge. I'm simply not in a financial position to cover these losses ATM, nor will I be in the foreseeable future. I'm strongly considering cobbling together the money for a NUC or something similar that's tiny, but technologically current that I can just download stuff onto, watch once, then delete. My current setup would be considered archaic at this point, so trying to salvage it would probably be the definition of throwing good money after bad.
That said, I can't really complain all that much. This system has been quite the trooper for several years up until this point. And everything else works just fine. When drives aren't keeling over, it's remarkably stable and I can't remember the last time I encountered a BSOD.
So, I guess that's about all that's fit to print (for now). Wish me luck.
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Sorry for the late reply. Some real-life stuff got in the way.
Thanks for all the feedback. I wound-up sending the drive to RRP for possible recovery. I mailed it last Friday, so I don't expect to hear anything for at least a few more days. I put an unofficial limit of $300, but because the drive can be read for about a minute after the OS loads, I'm hoping that it'll be less than that and that it's something relatively simple, like maybe an overheating or otherwise marginal, but not 100% failed, part, like you see with a lot of RRP's Macbook repairs.
Regarding which drive to get, as I currently understand it, SMR is employed on WD drives up to 8 TB. At 8 TB and beyond, it's CMR. However, at the 8 - 12 TB range, you might be getting a regular air drive. For a helium drive, you have to go above 12 TB models.
The creme-de-la-creme is the 18 TB monster, which I've been told are rebranded Red Pros. I think I'm going to save up for one, which have been as low as $279 as recent as last week. I know that's a risk, especially if you don't employ some sort of fancy striping, but I think I'm willing to rely on the drive technology versus getting into something I know absolutely nothing about (i.e., RAID).
On the really irritating front, I have another drive that hasn't failed, but is reporting a couple of SMART errors. I simply cannot offload all the data onto anything else ATM, so I'm really stuck, especially if I do wind-up paying for the recovery. What's interesting is that DP hasn't flagged it for removal, so maybe it isn't exhibiting particularly dire errors. If anyone is curious, this is what Scanner says:
I only noticed it a few days ago, so I don't know if those values are increasing at an alarming rate or if they've been static for months (maybe years). The drive is an HGST.
I am going to investigate the folder-level duplication feature of DP, though given the massive size of my media folder versus the space I have on-hand, that may not prove to be (currently) viable. Still, it's something to pursue and work towards.
So, that's currently all the news at my end that's fit to print. Again, thanks for the feedback and pointers.
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Huh, I didn't know DP could perform per-folder duplication. I'll definitely check that out once I can get the system settled. I should probably go ahead and purchase another 10+ TB drive while I'm at it.
Just as a follow-up, I put the drive in my fridge overnight and just tried reading it. It worked for about two more minutes than before, then died again. The motor still spins, but there's a spanner in the works somewhere.
Through some teeth gnashing, I also went ahead and contacted RRP to explore my options. I'm now just waiting to hear back.
If RRP can recover, say, 90% of the data, is there an easy way to reintegrate such back into the pool? I'm sure DP has its own descriptor files & folders that're required when doing a removal through DP itself which, if not present, makes that process impossible. Which f&f's absolutely have to be present and what are they called?
Speaking of buying new drives, I've resorted to shucking since the OEM ones are still commanding absurd prices. I also now know to be wary of shingled drives. Any recommendations? I've been a WD fan for most of my life, but am open to other makes & models.
Thanks again.
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Okay, I deslected those options within DP. When I next rebooted, in the nick of time, I managed to assign a drive letter, do a dir /s /b on the drive, and capture the output. Lotsa stuff that can be replaced, but predictably, there was more than a few files that will be exceedingly difficult to re-source.
It's a good thing I didn't keep my banking records on that drive.
One thing I thought I noticed were directory entries with no associated files. Can DP store directory markers on one drive, but the files in that directory on another drive? - nvm, I confirmed that when I put the drive into an external dock and tried to copy the files (which didn't work).
That's a heckuva relief that DP doesn't span individual files across drives. You can't imagine the nightmares I was beginning to have over that.
I'm strongly leaning towards going ahead and contacting RRP for a recovery quote. It's the only place I know that (I presume) won't charge a kidney. I'm thinking that, assuming I can get an affordable quote, I should probably just send the drive in now, while it's still being recognized for a few minutes. I figure that, if I wait until the drive stops being recognized altogether, it'll just put the data in that much more jeopardy.
Thanks for the explanations and help!
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Here's a thought - could I simply just assign a drive letter to the troublesome drive and, while it's still being recognized, do a simple dir /s, capture the output, and go from there?
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Thanks for the quick reply. I kinda/sorta get what you're saying on an abstract level, but not on a nitty-gritty one.
I suppose it comes down to the age-old question of where exactly are the files stored on a pooled system, especially and critically if they're not duplicated on other drives. From what I recall when I installed DP some years ago, I chose to NOT have a software RAID-style setup, instead opting for a simple JBOD configuration since I didn't have many drives at the time and, therefore, almost no storage space to spare. I figured if I needed to do any drive replacements in case of potential/probable future failures, DP would automagically sense that based on SMART alerts, move what it could off the affected drive(s), and notify me accordingly. Since this drive didn't throw out any SMART errors, though, DP was (I assume) caught unaware.
So, assuming DP can't read and move the data on its own, what do I do now, apart from pulling the drive? If the drive does prove to be unrecoverable (which is looking more and more likely), how do I know what I have and what I don't? A huge concern is if DP spans data across drives, in which case everything on the pool could be in jeopardy, with bytes missing of various sizes from God only knows how many files. And even if DP doesn't do that, I'm still saddled with the might-be-impossible task of determining which files are (or were) on the failed drive.
And if/when I do pull the drive, what next? Once I remove the drive entry in DP, is there anything else I need to do? Or can do?
BTW, I did notice where someone had posted a Powershell script to collate and report where each and every file is physically located on each and every drive in a pool. I guess I should start using it on a pretty regular basis, perhaps daily. I wish my eyes were as razor-sharp as hindsight.
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Yesterday, I got the dreaded notice from DP that a disk had dropped out of the pool. After a reboot, the drive reappeared, so I started the removal process. About 10% in, the drive dropped out again. Rebooting seems to revive the drive, but now it only gets to 0.3% before it drops out. Only the percentage figure shows progress (up to the aforementioned 0.3%) - the actual byte report remains static, which makes me suspicious that any data is genuinely being transferred.
What really sucks is that this drive (a 4 TB WD Red) was almost full. I didn't RAID anything, so it's just a simple JBOD pool.
I'm old and probably going senile, so I have no clue on how to proceed. I'd really like to get the data off the drive (if possible), but I'd rather not spend $1,000+ to do so. I suppose I could contact an outfit like Rossmann Repair Group since they're now doing PC drive recovery, but I don't know if the resultant data structure would even be usable and could be reintegrated back into the pool.
Oh, also of note is that this drive didn't throw out any SMART errors. I know SMART isn't 100% reliable at indicating bad or soon-to-be-bad drives, but it's still weird and irritating. I doubt it's the controller, as there are other drives attached doing just fine. The case's backplane could also be a point-of-failure, but that strikes me as unlikely.
Anyway, I'd really appreciate some pointers. Should I throw the drive into a freezer covered in uncooked rice? If I pull the drive now in its crippled state and try reading it on another Windows machine, what will come up when doing a simple dir or ls? Can I try putting it in another drive bay (I have several free) or will that make DP go bonkers?
And lastly, if worse comes to worst and I have to trash the drive, how can I remove its presence from DP without upsetting the rest of the pool?
I'm using the latest version of DP (2.2.4.1162) on a Windows 10 machine. Thanks in advance.
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Okaydoke. I just removed the letter manually. Thanks for the replies.
Can Scanner hold drives hostage?
in General
Posted
Urgghh. I need Sherlock Holmes to figure out what the hell is going on with my system. Right now, DP is going through an absolutely agonizing rebalancing process that, by my estimation, will take at least 24 more hours to complete. I don't know what spurred this, as it looks like it's evacuating an entire drive for no discernible reason.
It's a good thing I don't drink.
Anyway, thanks for the quick reply. I'm ASSuming that, when the filesystem error occurred, that's when Windows took the drive offline, which caused it to drop out of the pool. I'd still like to know what, exactly, happened to cause the error in the first place, but that's probably buried in some arcane unreadable logfile in a directory that's twenty levels deep.
I'm 99.9999% convinced I just need to shuck the entire system and start from scratch. Save what drives look to be salvageable and throw some serious money at a new platform. My system is so ancient that I can't even upgrade to Windows 11 (well, at least not without some Rufus-style hacks).