RobbieH

Quick update: TestDisk could see the partition, but could not recover it. Recuva - neat app but it can't copy out from RAW partitions. EaseUS looked really promising. It could see a lot of the data on the RAW partition, but really not the stuff I needed. THEN I GOT TO THINKING - wait a minute, I made a copy of all that data onto another VM on my server. Sure enough, pretty much everything I needed back was sitting right there. I had forgotten I did that. So as far as data loss goes, I have to re-rip my movies, but that's OK, I knew the risk when I didn't duplicate them. I work from home so it's really not a big deal to put in the ones I want to have on hand for now. I'll get this 8TB drive tested using Seatools and see if I need to send it back or not and go from there. Once I get it all set back up I'll go over the Scanner settings. Thanks!

No power failures, UPS in place, no disconnects, no crashes. It was working until I did a reboot, which should be a normal shutdown. I pulled the drive and plugged it into my dock, and my dock went POP and smoke came out. Have a new dock on the way... it just wasn't a good day yesterday. Thank you for those tools, I could not find anything on the internet other than EaseUS, and they appear to be Chinese which makes me a little scared to send my credit card number to, and they have conflicting info on their pricing - I won't go into that here. Dock should be here tomorrow. Once I get everything back to normal, I may ask some questions about how to make sure I have Stablebit running correctly. I noticed it said something along the lines of "everything was oK when last tested on xx/xx/2017 which leads me to believe something wasn't set up right.

One of my drives suddenly switched to RAW and I cannot "see" any of the data. Scanner has been running on this box for years, and it has never said there was any problem with the drive. I had to do an update today, which required a reboot, and upon reboot the drive is RAW. Of course I can't run CHKDSK on a RAW drive... and Scanner still says the drive is good?!?! So, I googled around on the internet to hopefully find an easy solution (sort of like we used to do on FAT drives where we would recreate the MBR) but I could not find any good solutions. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Right now I'm running with the one drive added, only using it for recording from WMC and for MCEBuddy to read from. I have not re-established the pool, I want to make sure that the drive is 100% stable before I do. So far so good, but we will see. I'm going out of town this weekend so it'll continue to get used over the weekend. Maybe when I return on Tuesday I'll create a pool again. Oh, Scanner is testing the drive in the background too, so that's a little more that's going on as a test. You guys have me worried that I might have a controller problem, so I'm very nervous about putting the pool back.

So it has been over a week without DP installed, and zero corruption issues. I am going to put back ONE drive today, with a new cable, and pool across them. I really need to do this anyway because the only existing drive right now is an 8TB Seagate archive drive, and it's too slow to be a recording drive for WMC and the other tasks I need to do. I'm taking your advice and partitioning off 1TB of the 5TB WD Red to set up as "SSD", and will also use that partition for WMC's recorder. This is using an Intel S1200RP motherboard and the onboard SATA controllers. Another VM, with two HGST NAS drives running WSE2012 and DP is still going strong, no problems at all.

I am very sorry to hear about your medical issues. I suppose it could be a controller issue, but other drives in this box are working as expected, just on different VMs. I'm nixing the idea of a cable issue, I think it would be very unusual to have three cables to go bad at the same time. For now I'm going to leave DP out, and might even remove Scanner, just to ensure these are not the cause of the issues. If I have more problems, I'll know that the problems can't be DP or Scanner.

When I start seeing problems, I would check them all. But again, I am down to just one drive. And even now it is flaky as hell. The server just now thinks I have no drives in the pool. I clicked "Add", and it installed a driver for Covecube Drivepool, I'm telling you, something is flaky. In other words, the "non-pooled" drives are down to just C:, and there are no drives in the pool. My H: drive shows up, but is no longer in the pool and it also cannot be added to the pool. So I guess I'm now down to zero drives. Is Christopher gone from the forum? Now this is getting frustrating because it's completely unstable. Unhappily, I have now uninstalled DrivePool from this server. I have recopied from backups multiple times just to lose them again, and the stuff I did not have backups of are gone for good (which I blame on me) due to corruption. NO WAY, I just removed DrivePool and now that drive is blank too, asking to be formatted. It cannot be a coincidence that I lost so many drives all at once, and only the drives in the pools. it is reporting back as RAW, the partition is gone. I'm now toast.

I confirmed one of the drives was bad, but it is out of the pool. I've mentioned this above. There actually was a problem with Scanner that was showing SMART errors incorrectly: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/2661-hard-drive-errors-next-steps/&do=findComment&comment=18306 Nothing updated, stated above this is Windows 7.

Because it's a VM. DP is in a VM. I have talked many times with Drashna about it. It's configured correctly, and has been running right for years. Checkdisk runs at pre-boot, DP can't start until Windows is booted. Yes, I have checked for viruses. Plex is the main application on this server, but it's been there since day 1. The only other app is WMC.

Spider, all the common CHKDSK errors. File descriptor errors, security errors, truncated files, orphaned files... I got 'em all. The only thing between the motherboard and the hard drives are SATA cables.

Things go wonky, DP won't duplicate, says "errors on disk" Reboot computer CHKDSK runs for hours, and I mean like 12 hours. All sorts of data corruption issues are repaired. Run for a while, BAM, data corrupted again.

Second drive did fail WD tests and is being replaced by WD. But, I still don't know why I am getting data corruption with that drive out.

Overnight I ran WD extended diagnostics on one of the 5TB Red drives. It came back with no errors. I'm about to start it on the second drive.

Just took a look, no errors to be concerned about. A few for not being able to set up shares due to missing folders (of course) and looks like I have an NTP issue, but no hardware related or IDE/SCSI errors.

I did not want to blame Drivepool, I've been using it for years and have been a supporter the entire time, but something's going wrong with my servers and I think it's due to the latest beta. I upgraded a while back based on a recommendation, but now I can't keep my servers up. Don't worry, I'm not upset, I can recover from whatever happens, but this is just getting tiring trying to figure out what's going on. It all started when one of my WD 5TB Red drives starting throwing SMART errors on "server 1", reported by Scanner. Not long after that, I started getting corruption errors. To make matters worse, the STxxx blah blah 3TB drive I use as a dup drive on a second VM also started failing, and throwing errors. Two problems at once. Joy. So, I pulled both drives from "server 2" and replaced them with 4TB HGST NAS drives. OK, so that one has been stable since. But, I'm still fighting issues on "server 1". I bought a 8TB archive drive, since I was running low on space anyway. It took me SEVERAL days to get all the data to the point I could remove the 'failing' WD 5TB drive. But, finally, after hours and hours of chkdsk /f and chkdsk /r and trying to move data, rinse repeat, I finally got that drive to remove. OK, things look good. I go a couple of days and it seems things are stabilized. Oh, I spoke too soon. Data is corrupting not only on the other 5TB drive, but now also data is corrupting like crazy on the new 8TB drive. I can't do a dang thing, I can't breathe in the general direction of the box even, without having data corruption and everything screwed up. I don't know what logs you need, what ANYTHING you need. You know I've supported Drivepool and Scanner. Maybe I'm wrong and it's not the fault. But I can't think of what else it might be. I haven't jacked around with anything that I know of.

In your post, you mentioned ISO files, but the last picture shows the setting for .DVD files.

I figured out more... once you have the drive formatted in the VM's IDE controller, you can move it over to the SCSI controller with no issues. Once I did that, I got SMART data for the drive.

chkdsk /r takes a LONG time, just so you know. Especially if you have sectors that are hard to read.

Eh, no reason to say sorry, it happens, and I made bad choices on drives. I said WD Red, that's incorrect. My 5TB drives in the other server are reds. This is a 3TB Green that I ran WDIDLE3 on, trying to get more life out of it. It is 2 years out of warranty, so that tells you it's not a "fresh" drive. Lessons learned on both of those. I just ordered a pair of 4TB (I don't need huge space in this server) HGST NAS drives to replace them. They will be here tomorrow. These are the drives that record data from my Blue Iris system (ten 3MP cameras), so I figure a little more speed can't hurt, and they were only a few bucks more. Of course I use them for more than just that, but that's what keeps them busy all the time. Been wanting to try some of them anyway, even though they may be more noisy, generate a little more heat and use a little more power. It didn't hurt that I was able to order them today and they will be here tomorrow for free, the WD Reds were 2 BUSINESS day shipping, which meant Monday evening.

I figured out how to work around this issue. I discovered this while trying to configure a 3TB drive in my other server. There's something in VMWare that blocks how the BIOS sees the drives. So, a 3TB drive shows up as 700 GB, and a very large drive shows up as 1.3TB. I believe the issue only occurs when using RDM drives. I found that if you first format the drives in another machine, then put them in the server, they work perfectly.

I like that idea, thanks! Hey, this is unrelated, but I need some help. On a separate server, I have had some major corruption issues. The primary drive is a 3TB WD Red, and the duplication drive is my one last remaining Seagate 3TB bundle of joy. I don't know what caused it, but data on both drives got really really badly corrupted. I think I have a situation where both drives are failing at the same time. I started getting SMART errors on both drives at about the same time, and now I'm to the point that I removed the Seagate from the pool and diskpart / clean 'd the drive. On the WD, it is so corrupted that even after 3 days chkdsk /r will not complete, it hangs at the end. So, I tried removing that drive, but it will not complete. Here is what I THINK I need to do, but I need a sanity check: Stop drivepool, and copy everything from the PoolPart folder on the WD Red that is failing to the new drive. I'm thinking at this point to go as far as to uninstall DrivePool. Install 2nd new drive. Create new pool with same drive letter as the old pool. Data will move to new PoolPart folders and will operate as it did before. Does this sound correct?

I have two regular hard drives (WD Red) and one Archive drive. I want files to first copy to the regular drives, then be moved off later to the archive drive. I'm guessing I can do this with the SSD Optimizer. Under Drives, I set the two regular drives as SSD, then the archive drive as Archive. I'm not sure what the best way to set the rest of the settings would be. Also, would this affect how duplication is performed? In my case, it really won't matter if all the duplication is done on the two regular drives (SSD in optimizer) but I certainly do not want to end up with no duplicated files. I have set the file placement to drop all of my movie rips and TV shows onto all three, since I never duplicate these. I can always re-rip them if I need to, and since they are what takes up 99% of my space. Everything else is stored just on the two regular drives since these are more dynamic.

So all my drives are RDMs so that I can get SMART info, and so that they will stay in Windows format. I have two VMs that access their own drives. A Windows Server Essentials 2012 with two 2TB drives, and the W7 box with the 5TB drives and the one 8TB. Each of the two VMs have their own SCSI controllers. WSE uses SCSI-1, W7 uses SCSI22. I tried adding a third SCSI controller to the W7 VM, but it will not let me. I'm guessing this is a limitation of the free license. The boot disk is a normal VMWare drive (SSD) for boot on SCSI-0. I did notice that using the Virtual IDE controller limits the drive so that it cannot pass SMART info to Scanner. Not the end of the world, really. This has been running like this for a long time under 5.5. I just did the 6.5 upgrade yesterday. I'm not sure what it is specifically you want me to check, but if you'll clarify I'll be glad to check it out.

Here's how Disk Manager looks. Note the 5TB drives are fine. The DrivePool says 2TB, but it shows up as 9+ in "Computer". Don't worry, I've been trying to partition it in every way. This is after doing a "clean" in diskpart. See above, I did try that. But, it's still sitting at 1.3T As far as I know, it does. Whoa, that's strange!!! Putting it on an IDE controller in VSphere fixed it. Boy that kind of stinks, but oh well.

I changed the SCSI controller from LSI SAS to PVSCSI and no luck. This is Windows 7 64 bit, my 5TB drives are working just fine.