WHS2011 Died - PoolPart Recovery

[Cafe]

My WHS2011 server finally died (boot drive) and I decided it was time for a dedicated NAS., I am moving to a QNAP 4 drive system.

 

Anyway, after the death of the WHS boot drive I pulled out my 5 x 2 TB drives and 2 x 5 TB WD RED drives. I backed up the 2 TB drives and had no problems reading the "pool part" folders and grabbing the ServerFolder content and backing it up.

 

The recovery was performed on a Win 10 64 bit machine linked to an external Vantec USB3 hard drive dock which I slotted the 2TB drives in one by one. Data was then stored on a couple of large external LaCie drives.

 

When I tried to do this for the  5 TB drives I got an error (Location is not available) message indicating I couldn't access the drive although it shows up in the list of drives under "My PC"

 

Initially I checked (and changed) the share permissions to Everyone/ALL. No joy.

 

Checking the Drive Manager, the drive partition was listed as RAW. I downloaded a product called EASUS (trial) and it found the missing folders/files...but I don't want to pay $70 to recover the files if I don't have to. 

 

One of the things that attracted me to DrivePool was that if I pulled a drive I could just access the files contained on the drive directly.

 

What am I doing wrong? Can anyone suggest a solution?

[Cafe]

Thank you friend! That was indeed the problem.

 

I had no idea my HDD dock had a 4 TB capacity limit. Connecting the 5 TB disk directly to a spare SATA in the PC did allow me to read it and it is merrily copying away as we speak!

 

Thanks again!

[Umfriend]

Is the external USB HDD dock documented to support HDDs and volumes in excess of 2TB? Could you try and connect it to anything somehow that is only SATA, whithout a USB-SATA conversion? Perhaps installing it in the machine itself?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Also, it's worth noting that eSATA/SATA should be used whenever possible.  USB has a number of other issues, as well (stability). 

[Umfriend]

You're welcome. I was not actually aware of USB-SATA bridges messing up > 4TB as well, just > 2TB. And >2TB I can understand, >4TB makes no sense to me.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You're welcome. I was not actually aware of USB-SATA bridges messing up > 4TB as well, just > 2TB. And >2TB I can understand, >4TB makes no sense to me.

 

Conceptually, I agree.  But basically, it's an issue with the bridge chipset being used.   And "cheaped out" is probably the best explanation that I could give (and that's a guess).