Randomified

Sorry to revisit such an old topic. Our actual scenario is: using DrivePool on a backup-receiving server (essentially a relatively 'dumb,' single-purpose Windows file server) to combine four "3TB" drives to 11TB. Over the past few years, the data that is being backed up has grown faster (in terms of individual file sizes) than we'd estimated. I am now having to 'empty' one of the physical drives as much as possible by transferring its files to fill up / fit into the free space on the other 3 drives, so that one drive has enough space to receive the incoming files. I don't want auto-balancing to undo my work in that, but I do want to make sure that any incoming backup files still go to the drive with the most free space. How do I best configure or ensure this in the Balancing settings? Thank you.

Just sent you a screenshot through our contact-form conversation; I was having difficulty uploading it here.

Curiosity question, continuing the topic of large files: Say I have a pool of six 1GB drives (not at all cost-effective, I realize, but theoretically...) It's my understanding as stated above that files are stored completely normally on the underlying NTFS, and can be recovered from individual drives if the pool fails, etc. This pool presents to the system as one <6 GB virtual drive. I try to move a 4 GB home video from a camcorder onto the virtual drive. That should work, right? After all, the OS thinks it's all one storage space. What happens behind the scenes? I mean, I guess the file has to be split up somehow between the real drives, right? Would manual reconstruction somehow be possible, in an emergency? etc. If drive-leveling balancing is in effect, the drives are almost full, and a file is copied to the virtual drive for which there is supposedly still plenty of room, but no single drive in the pool has enough space for this file, what happens? Thanks!

In the other post about someone having a similar problem, they mentioned "There appears system log VSS error every time I run Scanner recheck." I went and looked at the System Event Log, and did find the following: A log like that, or similar, happened 6 times overnight. It sounds possibly more in line with what you're expecting, though I have no idea why the total discrepancy with the Vssadmin message. I recall reading, somewhere in my forum search here, about someone needing to tweak an advanced setting so DrivePool reported NTFS instead of CoveFS to the operating system. I almost attempted to find that again and give it a try, but decided to play it safe and wait for a response instead. ;-) * Edit * Ah, re-found that NTFS option: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Advanced_Settings via this thread: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/861-mac-file-too-large-for-the-volumes-format/

All three servers that I'm currently trying to set up gave precisely the same response as before, "No items found that satisfy the query." It's possible I made some mistake in setting up the servers, but I just perused 'Features' that Windows Server offers to install, and didn't see any option about VSS that I might have skipped before... I'll try to Google that message.

I saw your message about I did again get the File System Damaged message after the OS drive finished scanning. After following your instructions, this is the output: "vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool © Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp. No items found that satisfy the query." Was that an expected result? I got the same response running that command on two other servers, as well.

Amazing response time, thanks! :-) Installed, and it's checking now. One question--after reboot, the updated Scanner said that none of the drives have been checked at all before, so it apparently lost its old scanning info. Does/will that always happen after installing an update?

Earlier I had found this site through Googling: http://www.hvsent.com/chkdsk-is-not-fixing-the-errors/ But it's just disconcerting if a tool that's supposed to be monitoring drives is constantly telling you that one of yours has a problem! And I assume that many/most Scanner users don't have this problem with their OS drive, as I haven't seen any warning or disclaimer about it from StableBit, nor does it seem like a strongly prevalent question in the forums.

I'm in the middle of trialing DrivePool/Scanner, and the latter is giving me a problem that sounds AWFULLY similar to this one: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1172-file-system-damaged/ No matter what I do, or how many times I run ChkDsk, I get "File System Damaged" for my C: drive within Scanner. Running Scanner ver. 2.5.1.3062 on Windows Server 2008 R2 I try to do a ChkDsk (scheduled for reboot) with /F /V /R /B, which to my understanding is just about as thorough as can be for an NTFS drive. Running ChkDsk in a command-prompt, no flags, gives this warning: "The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk might report errors when no corruption is present." One of the errors I'm frequently seeing in such a situation is "The Volume Bitmap is incorrect." Yet when I try to do a thorough check/repair at reboot, Windows says there is no problem! Like the above forum post, I had removed drive letters for my DrivePool drives and instead mounted them to C:\DrivePool HDs\Drive0 C:\DrivePool HDs\Drive1 etc. Taking a pointer from that poster, I tried unmounting and re-mounting, then ChkDsk /F during reboot, to no avail. Then I tried unmounting, ChkDsk /F /V /R /B at reboot, and Scanner STILL flags a problem when I tell it to scan (with DrivePool drives still unmounted). * Edit * Immediately after that last attempt, I went in and re-enabled verbose logging for ChkDsk, in advanced options, since that setting clears at reboot. Then I had Scanner re-scan to make sure the log file had more info. This time it PASSED, even though the two attempts were only minutes apart, with the 'verbose' setting being the ONLY change. What?! Trying to repeat my good fortune a second time showed File System Damaged again, though. I will submit log files through the Contact page, but wanted to keep the discussion (mostly) public in case this helps someone else in the future. There was no conclusion posted for that conversation; has some solution been found? If not, could we get an option to exclude only specified drives from File System checking?