Jaga

Odd. I steer clear of storage spaces whenever possible. And I've used soft RAID 0 volumes (created in Windows Disk Management) in Drivepool *many* times for testing, so the assumption that Disk Management isn't a valid tool for RAID with Drivepool is incorrect. I highly doubt storage spaces has anything to do with it showing up. I've never seen Christopher or Alex comment about needing a PowerShell command to get a soft/hard RAID volume to show up. But as I suspect @Christopher (Drashna) will be reading this topic, we'll hear what he has to say about your solution. The issues that I linked to in my original reply were about normal (non-RAID) volumes and their odd behavior in the Non-pooled list.

Sounds like it's enumerating them before the Pool drive. Does assigning them all (DVDs and Pool drive) manually in Windows Disk Management and then rebooting result in the same letter-shuffling?

I also had trouble with a volume showing up in Drivepool, never was able to resolve it. It appears that a few of my drives randomly and infrequently add or remove themselves to the list of available Non-Pooled drives. I tried a few things with Christopher's help, to no avail. You may want to step through some of them and see if they help you resolve why it isn't appearing there. If nothing seems to, Christopher may ask for you to submit a ticket.

Have you tried running a duplication re-check in DP? Click on the small gear in the upper-right, choose Troubleshooting, then "Recheck duplication..".

Unfortunately I think you're stuck with emptying the current volume, then re-creating it with a larger cluster size so you can get a larger volume. I've never tried 3rd party partition management tools with a Cloud Drive, but I highly doubt they'll work on it the same way they do on conventional volumes.

And if that doesn't work, you can use Diskpart to fix the volume: Open an elevated command prompt (administrator) Run Diskpart: DISKPART.exe List all volumes in use: DISKPART> list volume Select volume you want to correct size on: DISKPART> select volume x (where x is the number of the volume) Extend the file system on the chosen volume: DISKPART> extend filesystem I use this regularly when Windows doesn't properly resize/recognize a volume during a shrink/extend on a drive.

So we have anchors on those pages, that's good to know! @kiritaku - hope all went well with your pool changes.

Good luck!

I've never tried a Cloud drive that large, so I can't really advise. But if you can keep the computer on and uploading, I'd do it. I would think with the block-storage nature of Stablebit Clouddrive, it would simply start up where it last left off when you turn the machine back on. Good tip.

Yep - if you don't specifically need it, I'd go ahead and disable it. Your pool drives (both the child pool and mirror/master pool) are either un-mirrored or 2x mirrored at the pool level, and I don't think you have any file/folder mirroring going on, so you don't have any specific need for what it can do.

You may be overworking the solution. What may be helpful is all of your pool files to be only on A and B, with the Cloud drive empty. You have your child pool setup as D, then you create the master pool E by adding in the child pool D and the Cloud drive Z, and immediately give E full 2x pool duplication: when viewing the E pool in DP, click the up-arrow next to Manage Pool, choose File Protection, then Pool File Duplication. That will allow you to enable 2x duplication on the E pool, using the child pool and the cloud drive. You don't need to enable the drive usage limiter at all, if you setup as I described. D and Z would end up being exact mirrors of each other - both are masters in a 2x full pool duplication. And pool D doesn't need any duplication or limiting at all, unless you want certain folders/files inside of it to get extra protection using those two drives. As said above, I wouldn't start with a pre-populated Cloud drive for mirroring, I'd have it empty and allow Drivepool to locally populate it (which it does after enabling pool duplication on E).

If you're going that route, you'll want to consider your old pool architecture (how many drives, what size, etc) compared to the new one. If you have the same number of drives, the migration still isn't too hard: Deactivate the licenses, uninstall the software Share each hidden Poolpart-xxxxx folder (from each of the old pool's drives) on the network (i.e. OldPool-E, OldPool-F, etc) Install Drivepool on the new machine, create a new pool using your new drives, then stop the Drivepool service (optional). Access each network drive-share you created on the old machine, and copy it's contents into each hidden Poolpart-xxxxx folder in the new pool. Each drive in the Pool has one on it. Start up Drivepool on the new machine (restart the service first if you stopped it), and tell it to re-measure the pool so it can see all the content you copied in. If you have a different number of drives, that's okay too. You'll have to copy the files from the old network drive-shares into the new Poolpart-xxxxx folders on each new drive, and then re-measure (first) and re-balance (second) on the new machine. If your new drives are large enough, you can copy multiple old Poolpart-xxxxx folder contents into the same Poolpart-xxxx folder on the new pool. Basically you are manually populating the new pool's drives with the old files via network copy, then telling Drivepool to "go see what's there" (re-measure), and "spread it all out evenly" (re-balance). You may want to use the Disk Space Equalizer plugin for Drivepool, to evenly spread out the newly copied files in the new pool. Install it, open Drivepool, toggle the plugin on once, let it run, then toggle it off. It won't matter if Drivepool/Scanner are deactivated/uninstalled on the old machine, since all you're doing is manually accessing the hidden Poolpart-xxxxx folder that it leaves on all pooled drives. DP doesn't need to be running, activated, or even installed on the old machine for that, just the new one. One thing of note: to keep the same folder structure your old pool had, you want to copy the folders/files from inside the old Poolpart-xxxxx folders exactly as they were. If you put files or folders into different locations from where they used to be, the pool won't look the same. The exception of course is copying two drives' worth of Poolpart-xxxxx contents into just one Poolpart-xxxxx on a new pool drive. The folder/file hierarchy inside the hidden Poolpart folders is important.

If you're asking about Drivepool and Scanner, they are very easy to migrate. You will need to deactivate the license in each piece of software before uninstalling it, so you can reactivate on the new system. Click the gear icon (upper right) in each, then Manage License. For the pool - simply shut down, migrate the physical drives to the new one, boot up and install Drivepool. It will see the prior pool drives, and re-create a new pool using them automatically. Then just reactivate both pieces of software on the new system using the activation key(s) you own. Click the gear icon (upper right) in each, then Manage License. If you are also using Clouddrive: Detach the drives, deactivate the license, install on new system, activate the license or trial and attach the drives. (per a quote from Christopher)

You can shut the system down, physically remove the drive, then boot up and remove the drive from the pool. At the point where the drive is "missing", Drivepool should stop trying to access it, which is what I suspect is giving you problems. It won't affect the other drives in the pool or the data on them. https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Removing a Drive from the Pool Scroll down to "Removing Damaged Drives".

Awesome. Seems like it was a timing issue. If you wanted to dig you could probably find out why, but delayed start on it shouldn't truly affect anything unless you have access to the pool immediately at boot time.

Glad to hear it Terry, good luck!

Scanner will scan them even -without- mounting them to a drive letter. If you want to run chkdsk in a command prompt, the easiest method is giving the drive a letter and then running it. There should be no need to delete a folder, especially if a drive is mounted to that folder. If you want to force a re-check in Scanner of the file system on a drive, make sure Automatic scanning is enabled (the big button up top), and "Perform work at any time of the day" is enabled in the General tab in Settings. Then click the + to the left of the drive, scroll down to file system health, click the down arrow next to it to open it, then the down arrow next to the swirling green arrow. Choose either Mark all file systems unchecked, or Mark all Damaged file systems unchecked. Scanner should then kickoff a File System check on that particular drive. You can have both a drive letter and a folder mount point assigned to any hard drive at any time (or neither). They are not mutually exclusive. Add a letter, remove a letter, mount to a folder, unmount from a folder - however you want to use it. Scanner doesn't truly care.

Scanner doesn't require a drive letter, even for a file system check. All nine (9) drives in my pool are mounted into subfolders on C:, and Scanner does it's regular surface & file system checks on them without complaint. I believe Scanner uses chkdsk for file systems, but to run deeper manual (command prompt) analysis/fixes with chkdsk a drive letter is easiest yes.

My pure NTFS pool had that identity issue as well for a little while. I don't recall what fixed it - I think it was either a DP service restart or a pool re-measure and a reboot. It's largely non-impactive from what I saw since I never had a problem with the data or volume. It was right around the time I first created the pool (9 drives, 64k format).

Have you tried setting them to Automatic (Delayed Start)? Might help if there are any timing issues. Also - is service Recovery set to auto-restart in the event of service failure?

Could this possibly be triggered by backup software? I would have assumed (perhaps incorrectly) a duplication check (via the small gear in the upper-right/troubleshooting) would look at sizes/created/last-accessed and correct anything out of sync. But not many people are going to do that on a regular basis to ensure consistency, especially since it's in the troubleshooting category. @tuthm - try the recheck duplication and see how it works for you. (edit) I see you already have!

Cool, didn't know they made those. Been doing it the old-fashioned way forever, but never had a problem. Nice to know they're available.

You could always just jump the pins in the MB connector of the PSU as well. Used to do that back in the old days for testing different PSUs and for running out-of-box components. If it's a standard ATX MB connector there are a lot of guides on the web how to do it easily with just a piece of wire and taping it on. No cost involved. I think that's what Christopher meant by a dumb jumper.

Usually you can toggle them unhealthy and then healthy one after the other, which gets around that. It sounds like Scanner lost settings on the crash/reboot. If you check "Enable Advanced Settings and Troubleshooting", a new selection appears in the Settings drop-down. In the Advanced Settings area you can now use "Backup settings" and "Restore settings" in case this ever happens.

Thought the Deactivate UI feature was for de/re-activating without uninstalling. One more note for my personal KB...