Running Out of Drive Letters

[Bear]

I use 2 x 8 bay DAS's and there is 1 empty slot.

As you can see from the screenshot, I am running out of drive letters.

If I put in a few USB drives, then I have a full house!

What do I do if I buy another DAS?  Or I have more than 1 virtual drive?

Does M$ revert to numbers after all the drive letters are taken?

[Shane]

Windows only supports drive letters A through Z.

However, it isn't necessary for a drive (other than the boot, system and pagefile drive, and perhaps CD/DVD drives and similar) to have a letter; drives can instead be accessed by mounting them as folders in another drive (e.g. C:\Array\Drive27, C:\Array\Drive28, etc) and furthermore itself DrivePool can have drives form part of a pool without being lettered or mounted at all.

To add/remove drive letters or mount drives as folders in other drives, use Windows Disk Management: right-click a volume and click Change Drive Letters and Paths...

Late edit for future readers: DON'T mount them as folders inside the pool drive itself, nor inside a poolpart folder. That risks a recursive loop, which would be bad.

Edited October 5 by Shane
Somebody crossed the streams...

[Bear]

Thanks for that, Shane

I'ii give it ago later on today when I get back from the dentist, I won't do it now at 2 in the morning/

I suppose I will still be able to access it manually if need be & 'Everything' will still index what's in the drives

[DaveJ]

I have a similar setup on my backup NAS. All non-Drivepool drives are mounted to folders at c:\mount and I can access the drives directly from there if needed.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Specifically, StableBit DrivePool and Windows doesn't need letters for the disks, nor even folder mount paths.  These are there to make it easier for users to access the drives.

But as somebody with 20+ drives, mounting the drives to folders makes things very easy.  And we do have a guide on how to do so: 
https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

[Bear]

I finally bit the bullet, shot myself in the foot & had to go to the hospital    🚑

When I got out of the hospital, I celebrated with a drink & got alcohol poisoning    🚑

When I got out of the hospital, I didn't have a drink, I just needed to go shopping as

all the food had gone off.  I bought a shop cooked chook & had it for dinner    🚑

When I got out of hospital for food poisoning.  I didn't drink or eat anything,

I went on a health kick & went for a bike ride, and got hit by a car    🚑

When I got out of hospital, I sold my house & bought another one nearer to the hospital    👍

Which was good, as I broke my foot moving the fridge     🚑

When I got out of the hospital, I wrapped myself in blankets. 

Actually, it was the nurse that made sure I was not coming back any time soon     👍

So now I had time to do what Shane said - see attached image

The only trouble is, I use Everything as my 'search engine' and it used to 'see'

4 million or more files, now it only sees 1.1 million files     😞

How can I search those files that I used to search before?

Is the answer to do what DaveJ suggested?  Which I don't understand     😵

p.s.  I numbered my HDD's as such, I have :-

2 x 3TB HDD's

2 x 4TB HDD's

3 x 5TB HDD's

6 X 7TB HDD's

3 X 9TB HDD's

Total = 97.3TB

[Shane]

Hi Bear; you need to mount the poolpart drives to paths on a NTFS drive outside the pool structure. So in your case don't mount them inside D:\ and don't mount them inside any *:\PoolPart.* folder.

That way #1 their content will still be visible in Everything (which I use too) and #2 you're not risking a recursive loop in your file system!

[Bear]

Thank you for the quick reply Shane

But I don't get it

Should I mount it as E:\ DRIVEPOOL\ 301 (& the rest of my folders?)

But leave my Drivepool as D:\ & put the folders in E:\DRIVEPOOL

I have trouble understanding the spoken word, I used to be more into numbers

[VapechiK]

hi

yes, what DaveJ suggested is your best bet.

and Shane is correct (as usual).  you have (in)effectively mounted your pool drives into a folder on the pool and this is causing Everything to fail and WILL cause other problems down the road.  to quote Shane:   "Late edit for future readers: DON'T mount them as folders inside the pool drive itself, nor inside a poolpart folder. That risks a recursive loop, which would be bad."

 

1.  on your C (Bears) drive, recreate the D:\DrivePool folder where you mounted your drives 301 302 etc.  so you now have C:\DrivePool with EMPTY folders for all your drives that are in the pool.  DO NOT try to drag and drop the DrivePool folder on D to C  mmm mmm bad idea.  just do this manually as you did before.

2.  STOP the DrivePool service (win + R, type 'services.msc' find StableBit DrivePool Service and Stop it).

3.  go to Disk Management and as in https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624   remount all the drives from D:\DrivePool into the drive folders in C:\DrivePool.  windows may/will throw some warnings about the change.  ignore them and remount all 16 from D:\DrivePool to C:\DrivePool. 

4.  reboot

now your file explorer should show Bears C:, DrivePool D:, and maybe G X and Y too, idk...

enable show hidden files and folders and navigate to C:\DrivePool.  doubleclicking any of the drive folders will show the contents of the drive if any and a hidden PoolPart.xxxx folder.  these PoolPart folders are where the 'POOL' lives.  and this is where/how to access your data from 'outside' the pool.  be careful they are not deleted.

5.  go to the folder DrivePool on D and delete it.  totally unnecessary after the remount from D to C and now it is just a distraction.

6.  life is good.

 

some advice:

for simplicity's sake, i would rename C:\DrivePool to C:\Mounts or something similar.  having your pool and the folder where its drives are mounted with both the same name WILL only confuse someone at some point and bad things could happen.

hope this helps

cheers

[Shane]

Pretty much as VapechiK says. Here's a how-to list based on your screenshot at the top of this topic:

• Create a folder, e.g. called "mounts" or "disks" or whatever, in the root of any physical drive that ISN'T your drivepool and IS going to be always present:
  • You might use your boot drive, e.g. c:\mounts
  • You might use a data drive that's always plugged in, e.g. x:\mounts (where "x" is the letter of that drive)
• Create empty sub-folders inside the folder you created, one for each drive you plan to "hide" (remove the drive letter of):
  • I suggest a naming scheme that makes it easy to know which sub-folder is related to which drive.
  • You might use the drive's serial number, e.g. c:\mounts\12345
  • You might have a labeller and put your own labels on the actual drives then use that for the name, e.g. c:\mounts\501
• Open up Windows Disk Management and for each of the drives:
  • Remove any existing drive letters and mount paths
  • Add a mount path to the matching empty sub-folder you created above.
• Reboot the PC (doesn't have to be done straight away but will clear up any old file locks etc).

That's it. The drives should now still show up in Everything, as sub-folders within the folder you created, and in a normal file explorer window the sub-folder icons should gain a small curved arrow in the bottom-left corner as if they were shortcuts.

P.S. And speaking of shortcuts I'm now off on a road trip or four, so access is going to be intermittent at best for the next week.

[Bear]

 Enjoy your road trip Shane    👍

When u wrote road trip, my 1st thought was from Animal House

Toga, toga, toga, toga, toga, toga (I know that was not in the road trip)

enjoy the trip    😛    👍

[Bear]

Good news everybody

I finally did it, and it felt good    😈

Then I 'moved' those drivepool folders out of D:\Drivepool & into its new home I:\HDD's

I could not do it without Shane (how was your trip) & VapechiK help

I used disk management to set-up the folders in I:\HDD's

Oops, I forgot to mention, before I started, I killed Drivepool by opening 'services.msc' & stopping Drivepool

It was easy as it guided me to use 'mount in the following empty NTFS folder'

I did that to all 16 folders.  Once done, I re-booted the computer

I then opened Drivepool, it wanted me to check the license number before it sprang to life

It picked up the folders in I:\HDD's right away - woo hoo

I opened up 'Everything' & it showed that I had 11,614,999 objects - wow man

All I had to do was go into D:\Drivepool & delete all the stuff in there

But how could I?  If I did the wrong thing, there goes decades worth of stuff    🫣

I selected it all.  Windoze said 'it will be permanently deleted', is that OK?

OK        😨       You know what happened?      🤔      All the folders were deleted, that's it      😅

But I could not bring myself to delete that Drivepool folder.  D:\DRIVEPOOL      Can it be deleted?

Good news everybody

I found a $99 case you can use Drivepool on & it can hold 72GB of HDD total (4 x 18GB)

$99 Probox 4 bay

Thank you everyone who has helped me over these months

I hope this will be of use to others in the future who have the same problem as me

With everyone getting more HDDs to store their everything, and people buying Christopher's amazing app, people will surely need this thread in the future

p.s.  Don't you love the way back machine green I used for this last post?    😋

 

 

[Shane]

Step 1: Right-click D:\DRIVEPOOL and choose Properties. If it reports 0 files and 0 folders then proceed to step 2, else halt.

Step 2: Without stopping the DrivePool service, rename the D:\DRIVEPOOL folder to something else (e.g. D:\OLDPOOL). If nothing complains or breaks then proceed to delete the renamed folder, else halt.

Trip was good, but these old bones are feeling the miles afterwards. That green is very garish on a white background btw.

P.S. You mentioned "If I did the wrong thing, there goes decades worth of stuff" - next step might be to plan/organise backing up your pool?

 

 

[Bear]

7 hours ago, Shane said:

Step 1: Right-click D:\DRIVEPOOL and choose Properties. If it reports 0 files and 0 folders then proceed to step 2, else halt.

Step 2: Without stopping the DrivePool service, rename the D:\DRIVEPOOL folder to something else (e.g. D:\OLDPOOL). If nothing complains or breaks then proceed to delete the renamed folder, else halt.

Trip was good, but these old bones are feeling the miles afterwards. That green is very garish on a white background btw.

P.S. You mentioned "If I did the wrong thing, there goes decades worth of stuff" - next step might be to plan/organise backing up your pool?

 

 

Cooee

Firstly, I use an add-on called 'Dark Reader' it turns my Firefox pages dark man.  So the green is on a black background, and it looks grouse    👍

I did step 1, it had 1 hidden folder worth 0 MB, so I went to step 2

in step 2, I renamed the folder to 'delete me', (that is my fav folder name for deletion)     😋    nothing whinged, except my cat, so I deleted the folder   😅   👍

There is now 97.3TB in the pool, that is way too much for this little black duck to back-up.  That is why I put my trust in Chris' app to look after my stuff.

I had an episode last year or the year before where for some reason, the app started to delete HDD's     😨    I think I lost 30TB, but hard drive recovery software did most of the heavy lifting & Chris' app did the rest, easy eh    👍

I see you are from Oz as well.  If U R travelling to N.W. Tassie, I will give you some moonshine.  That took the aches away from me, until my 4 decade long drinking binge had to stop due to my liver not being in a good condition.  I was in hospital for cellulitis to both of my shins, but all I remember was the doctor repeating, "the liver is the size of a footy & there are hard bits on it" (whatever that meant, I couldn't remember much as I woke up after being in a 2 day coma.  I couldn't move, my back was out, plus a few other things).  I gave up about a year later, and haven't really missed it at all.  I have moonshine in my bedroom cupboard & home-made apple cider in the fridge; I had 3 stubbies this year.

Since I don't drink anymore, I am in so much pain, I used to crawl up in a ball from it (if my back would allow it).  But I have Norspan now & if I hurt myself doing something, I just pop a Tramadol; but none of them give me a buzz, it just helps me with my pain.  Go and see your doctor and ask about Norspan, he/she will probably put you on Norspan 20mg to start with; you change the patch every week.  I am on 30mg & moving to 40 mg next year, that is the highest.  They lock it up in the vault & give it to you in your hand, and no-one else!  Thank you once again Shane for the help in this problem.  I have attached a copy of the green on black - memories.  cheers m8     👍

 

[Shane]

Glad to hear it went smooth. Are you using duplication instead of backups? Won't help with accidentally deleting a file but at least if a drive karks it that should keep you going.

No plans to visit Tassie any time soon sorry, I'm stuck in Queensland at present. I'll just have to raise a glass in your direction I guess.

The green on black does bring back memories of my uni days with the old vax/vms terminals!

[Bear]

3 hours ago, Shane said:

Glad to hear it went smooth. Are you using duplication instead of backups? Won't help with accidentally deleting a file but at least if a drive karks it that should keep you going.

No plans to visit Tassie any time soon sorry, I'm stuck in Queensland at present. I'll just have to raise a glass in your direction I guess.

The green on black does bring back memories of my uni days with the old vax/vms terminals!

I duplicate all HDD's, except the ones that have the OS's on them, with those, I use 'minitool partition wizard'.

The 4 bay enclosures I linked to above, I have 2 of the 8 bay ones, with a total of 97.3TB & I now have only 6.34TB free space out of that.  It works out cheaper to get the little 4 bay ones, and they take HDD's up to 18TB - sweet

If you like the black & green, you could always get a pint of XXXX & put green food dye into it, you don't have to wait till St. Patrick's Day.  That would bring back uni days as well     🤣   🍺   👍

" A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel down his daks

 He walks up to the bar & orders a drink

 The barman looks over the bar and says, "do you know you have a steering wheel down your daks?"

 The pirate goes, "aye, and it's driving me nuts""   🤣   🤣   🤣

🍺   👍   🍺   cheers