DrivePool Not Seeing Drives (+ a license issue)

[PocketDemon]

For some unknown reason DP is not seeing the 4 HDDs in a HP Microserver (Gen8), just the boot SSD.

 

It was working fine under Win 2012 R2, but a separate s/w incompatibility has meant changing to Win10 Pro... Initially the drives were seen, however there was a constant duplication error notice - so, having used alt s/w to compare my data on the pool (which was fine) I uninstalled DP -> formatted 2 of the drives -> copied the data across to them -> formatted the other two -> & reinstalled DP.

 

Now SB Scanner can see all 5 drives - & I've tried both the 2.2.0.619_x64_BETA (as that's the version I had to hand) & 2.2.0.651_x64_BETA...

 

 

...so, any ideas?

 

 

Completely separately, for the last week or so I've been getting regular pop ups saying that I need to activate both DP & Scanner on both this & my main server - & whilst it accepts the license each time, it keeps on reoccurring... Is this a issue at your end?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Open up disk management (run "diskmgmt.msc") on the system in question.  Make sure that none of the disks show up as Dynamic disks.

 

If they don't, try resetting the settings just in case:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B

 

 

 

As for the licensing issue, that is a very odd issue. Specifically, the licensing information is cached on the system, so it doesn't communicate with our servers unless there is a significant hardware change. 

 

If this is happening, you may have an issue with the system disk, that is causing the system to have issues reading files from the disk.  It also may be due to corruption of said files.

Resetting the settings may definitely fix this issue, though.

But it may be a good idea to run "chkdsk c: /r /scan" on the system, just in case. 

[PocketDemon]

Hi Christopher - many thanks for the reply... Deleting the Service folder in C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool (I was trying one thing at a time - & there naturally wasn't the option via the cog as there's no pool set up) has sorted the first issue completely.

 

 

As to the licencing issue, from what you're saying then whilst *an* occurrence could potentially be down to a real major h/w change (as I swapped from a 9260 to a 9271 card in my main server on Monday), the only other thing that's altered recently is now having a g-sync monitor; the g-sync element of which is re-detected every time it (the monitor) is turned off for longer than the monitor power setting.

 

Could it be that the s/w is being overly sensitive to h/w changes?

 

Cheers

 

TiM.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Glad to hear that the resetting the settings fixed the first issue out.

 

I suspect that this may have been due to corruption of the disk information. We pull this from VDS (Virtual Disk System), and rapidly changing disk information can cause all sorts of issues.  

 

 

As for the hardware change, no, we don't look at the add-on cards at all (controller cards, network cards, graphics cards, etc).  It's mostly the system drive, mainboard info and system name. 

We do include lenience on some of these, so that reinstalls don't get flagged right away. 

 

But if I had to guess, it would be that the above issue caused issues with the StableBit DrivePool service, as that holds the licensing status and the disk information.  

I know that in the newer versions, we've added more robust error checking and recovery for this information, so that you hopefully shouldn't see issues like this occur in the future.

 

 

 

 

Oh, and looking at the image again, if case it matters to you, we do offer a way to scan multiple disks on the same controller at the same time.

 

To do so, click on the Settings button in the toolbar and select Scanner Settings. Enable the Show advanced settings and information option. Click on the "Throttling" tab, and uncheck the "Do not interfere with other disks on the same controller" option. Click "Ok" to close the window.

Click on Settings, and select the new Advanced Settings and information option. Open the Configuration Properties tab. You will find a list of all the settings here, organized into section. Find the "Scanner" section, and set the "ScanMaximumConcurrent" setting to a higher number or "0". this sets the limit of the number of disks that can be scanned at the same time. 

[PocketDemon]

With the licensing issue happening on both machines the DP is installed on, it seems unlikely that the odd corruption issue on this machine.

 

Hopefully it's just a temp glitch/bit of incompatibility with some other s/w upgrade that'll resolve itself.

 

 

As to scanning multiple drives on the same controller simultaneously, it's the way I've got the other system set up - well, with 37 drives connected up then it's perhaps kind of a necessity... ...& naturally the lsi card can easily handle it.

 

With the MicroServer only having the 5 drives in & it being on 24/7 though, I simply didn't see it as being time critical enough to warrant turning it on tbh... 

 

So I've just opened the scanner gui up again &, along with moving all of the data about, duplicating it all, it running as a torrent box 24/7 & a few hours of media streaming, it's finished scanning all of the drives as well; so clearly it's not taking an inordinate amount of time.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, the other thing, could be antivirus software compatibility issues. Aside from that, I'm not entirely sure.

If the files are still there from when this happen, grabbing the error reports may help:

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

 

 

And, well, glad to hear it, on the larger system, as that can definitely take a while (and depending on the controller you're using, a PCI-e 2.0 8x card can handle scanning ~34 drives at 120MB/s at the same time, double that for PCIe 3.0, or for 16x, and quadruple if the card is using both). So, yeah, that system can definitely handle it.

 

As for the MicroServer, since I saw only the one drive scanning, I wasn't sure if you were aware of it, or wanted/needed it.  Figured I'd mention it just in case.

[PocketDemon]

Hi Christopher

 

I've just sent the logs via the contact page - so perhaps it can shed some light on things.

 

 

Otherwise, my apologies for the phrasing of the Scanner thing in the last message... Well, whilst I obviously got across why I was doing what I was doing (or rather why I wasn't bothering & that it wasn't having a negative effect), I neglected to note that your advice, whilst not what I am choosing to do on the HP server, would potentially have been useful if I'd not known about it.

 

Yeah, re-reading it then it comes across as being slightly too dismissive; which wasn't my intent.

 

Cheers

 

TiM.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Thanks, I'll take a look at the logs and flag them for alex if needed.

 

 

And no worries here. You didn't come off as dismissive as all here.  "We're" just used to being very verbose and prone to over explaining ourselves (not necessarily a bad thing for us to do, all things considered). 

 

And yeah, for the HP box, it may not need to concurrent scanning option to be enabled, as it does have a smaller number of disks. I just wanted to mention it, just in case.