Drivepool shows "starting service" for hours even though drive is usable

[Crustyman]

As the title says Drivepool has been taking ages for the GUI to load on Windows 11 lately, same with Stablebit Scanner.  Both show as "starting service" but the applications appear to be working in the background and the services are successfully running.  I have tried resetting the settings and also reinstalling but the problem persists.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I think you have a ticket for this open already.  But yeah, that's very unusual.   I'm personally running it on several Windows 11 systems (a mix of 21H2 and 22H2), and don't see this issue. 

That said, does Disk Management take forever to open too? 

[muaddib]

Did this get solved?

[muaddib]

I found the fix here

 

[Greg C]

HI everyone

I'm having the same issue, except the 'fix' isn't helping. I continue to get the Starting Service message and it continues for hours.

As well as deleting teh contents of the folders, I've also Repaired and uninstalled / re-installed the software wth reboots between.

My biggest concern, I've deleted the UI - do I still have a license key? I noted that I'd need to re-enter the key when the UI comes back up again.

Are there any other solutions or suggestions?

[Source_man]

I have the same issue, 18TB*4 drives pool, everytime i reboot my Windows, it will comsume 2hr~ to start service.

 

Windows Server 2022 Datacenter

21H2

20348.3692

 

Reset the stablebit Drivepool settings not worked.

[Shane]

Have you opened a support ticket with Stablebit?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

In some cases, resetting/Rebuilding WMI can fix weird issues. 

"Winmgmt /resetrepository" from an elevated command prompt and rebooting the system can help. 

[Source_man]

Hi, i think i found the root cause.

I have 30~40 ten thousand symlinks, and 1 symlink will generate one Reparse.CoveFs file META DATA.

So everytime i reboot my PC, Stablebit drivepool will spend a lot of ten to check the meta data.

I have add a new SSD to drivepool and makesure all of the symlinks are only place in this SSD.

However, drivepool will duplicate the meta data in different drive (HDD)...

My question is, can i force the METADATA only locate to my SSD? i don't want drivepool to duplicate this METADATA to another HDD drive...

Thank you. 

[Shane]

Hmm, in theory even if it's duplicating the metadata to other drives, it should still prefer to read from the fastest drive - but that presumes the metadata gets written to a SSD in the first place. Looks like forcing it can't be done from the GUI.

@Christopher (Drashna) does DrivePool internally prefer SSDs when it decides where to place the [METADATA] folder(s)? If not, can that be added as an option to DrivePool?

Actually, that would be a useful GUI-definable option to add to the Manage Pool -> Balancing -> File Placement -> Folders/Rules -> File placement options dialog in general, between the "New drives" and "Overflow" sections:

Preference -----------
  [✓] Prefer fast drives from those selected (e.g. SSD)
  [✓] Prefer slow drives from those selected (e.g. HDD)
  (i) If both or neither are selected, no preference will be made.

with the [METADATA] folder also visible and customisable here instead of being hidden (perhaps lock the other options for it).

[Christopher (Drashna)]

No, it dosen't have any preference.  But if you have read striping enabled, it should use that to optimize the reads.  

However, you might be able to use the file placement rules to hack this.  Eg, add a rule for "\.covefs\*" should work (or at least, dosen't error out).  This should allow you to specify a drive (and testing this, it looks to be respected)