Missing Server 2012R2 Essentials Share

[Jason_N]

I posted this over on wegotserved's forums, but on the off chance its a drivepool issue I thought I would post it here too. Hopefully someone will have some thoughts on what's happening.

The system's specs...

Server: Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H Mobo, Intel Pentium G3258 Haswell Dual-Core @ 3.2GHz, 16GBs G.Skill RipJaws X Series RAM

             (3) Western Digital 3TB Data Drives and an Intel 320 Series 80 SSD Hosting the OS.

 

Software: Windows Server 2012R2 Essentials, StableBit's DrivePool and Scanner, Plex Media Server and CrashPlan.

 

The Dashboard Storage tab is showing a shared folder as missing but still accessible from explorer. I've verified that the data is still in tact and copied it to another shared folder just to be safe. Oddly, if I sit with the Storage tab open and have the affected folder selected, every so often I will see the menus on the right hand side of the screen flicker, as if it's detecting the folder momentarily. Those menus are missing..."Open the folder", "Delete the folder" and "Move the folder".  All of my shared folders are on the "N:\" drive which is a Stablebit DrivePool. Every other share is working fine, showing its name, description, location, free space and status. The folder in question is our "Pictures" folder and its displayed as...

Pictures...................Blank Description..... N:\ServerFolders\Pictures...........Free space "Unknown"....... Status "Missing"

Right clicking on the share only gives two options... "View the folder properties" and "Stop sharing the folder" 

StableBit DrivePool and Scanner don't see any issues with either the folder or the pool it resides on. I'm thinking that, since I've copied the data, I may just delete the folder contents and remove the shared folder via the registry since "delete the folder" isn't an option. This may work for in this instance, but I'm concerned about this happening to a folder with considerably more data in it, so I'd like to figure out what happened or if there is a better work around.

 

What I really don't understand is, why is there no option to locate this missing folder? I'm coming from WHS and WHS 2011, but I'm pretty sure that if a folder went "missing", like when the OS was re-installed, it would give the option to update the folder's location. In this situation, there appears to be no such option.

I'll give it another day, but after that I'll probably just delete the "corrupt" folder, create a new one and copy the date back into it. 

If someone has a better solution I'd love to hear it since if this happens to a folder with a lot more date in it I may not have the free space to create a copy.

 

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

 

Thank you!

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Try looking at the logs in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Server\Logs". Check the dashboard log, and ... maybe some of the storage ones.

 

 

If you want, send ALL of the logs from that folder to me (either at drashna@live.com or christopher@covecube.com) and I'll take a look at them.

 

I suspect that this isn't a DrivePool related issue... but just in case:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection

Enable the logging and try to reproduce the issues.

[Jason_N]

Thank you for taking the time to help. I've sent a snippet of the logs to your live address. I'm thinking I will just end up deleting the folder and re-creating from the backup I made. As you'll see, the server is really focused on this folder for some reason.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Jason,

 

Thank you for sending the logs. Could you grab ALL of the logs, and zip them up instead?

This way, I can get a better look. Sometimes, the errors can be hidden and hard to find, if you don't know what you're looking for?

[Jason_N]

So... I ended up deleting the problematic folder, rebooting and re-creating the folder. Once the permissions were set up I copied the data back into the folder. So far so good. The only hiccup I've noticed was when I righted clicked folders under the "Storage" tab, then chose properties and finally the "Sharing" tab, I would see an error something like "cannot retrieve user access level permissions for the folder". However, this behavior has since corrected it self.

When it comes to computers I'm a bit OCD, so hopefully I can resist the urge to format and start over clean.

Drashna, I sent you the logs you've asked for, but since I've already deleted the folder, please don't feel obligated to dig into them. Since I've re-created the folder, my StorageService logs have dropped from 45+MB to under 2Mb, so I'm hoping that is a good sign.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, glad to hear you got it sorted, then.

 

We'll take a look at the files later then, just in case there is an issue.

 

 

If you do decide to re-format, then I recommend using the "64k" allocation unit size for the disks, as this is good for large storage files (such as video). This way, the disk will not get as fragmented to start off with, and you may see better performance on file access (as larger contiguous/sequential access of the files).