GPT Protective Partition

[xiphosm3]

Hey guys,

 

 

A few weeks ago Scanner notified me a drive was failing. I got a replacement drive, plugged it in via USB (ran out of SATA ports), and added it to the pool and removed the failing drive from the pool. Drivepool did its thing and all was well.

 

Last week I moved the drive from the external USB case to my 8 bay hot swap tower connected via eSATA to my computer. Did it with the power off, and when it powered on, the disk initialized, thought all was well but I didn't verify the data was still there.

 

Last night I got a notification that a good amount of data was missing. I went in and noticed the HDD I replaced was missing in Drivepool. Went into Disk Management and noticed the drive is now a 2048gb GPT Protective Partition with 1678 unallocated. This is not how I had setup the disk obviously.

 

I can't change any settings on the disk as all options are greyed out. This is the first time this has ever happened. I've added 4 drives over the year to this pool with zero issues. 

 

I read this thread: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1774-gpt-protective-partition/?hl=protectiveand their issue was software but I'm not running the same software. These are the only apps that should be accessing the drive.

AV: Avast Free

Backups: Crashplan and Arq. Arq hasn't touched the pool that the drive was on though.

Plex

 

 

 

Link to logs: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nk8hyxmuilbu44t/Service.rar?dl=0. I didn't turn on file system logging with these logs. Let me know if I need to.

 

Windows 10

Drivepool 2.1.1.561

[xiphosm3]

SOLVED: It looks it like it came from creating the GPT partition inside of a USB enclosure than transferring it to an internal SATA port. No idea how to fix the partition yet without losing data but its not Stablebits issue.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

To clarify, one of the disks in the pool has shown up as a "GPT Protective Partition", right?

 

If you moved the drive from an external USB enclosure to ... well, anywhere else, and you didn't check the disk, then it may have shown up this way in the new enclosure. 

 

This is unfortunately normal for USB enclosures, especially OEM ones like Seagate and WD. 

 

And it may be worth putting the drive back, as it may go back to working properly. 

 

 

However, if you're sure that the drive was working *after* moving it, then that's a problem. 

[xiphosm3]

To clarify, one of the disks in the pool has shown up as a "GPT Protective Partition", right?

 

If you moved the drive from an external USB enclosure to ... well, anywhere else, and you didn't check the disk, then it may have shown up this way in the new enclosure. 

 

This is unfortunately normal for USB enclosures, especially OEM ones like Seagate and WD. 

 

And it may be worth putting the drive back, as it may go back to working properly. 

 

 

However, if you're sure that the drive was working *after* moving it, then that's a problem. 

 

Yes one of the disks in the pool shows up as GPT Protective. 

 

When I bought the drive and put it into the USB case, I formatted it at 4TB NTFS and it was working just fine. It was only after I moved it to the 8 bay drive that it started showing this issue.

 

This is frustrating because I've pulled drives numerous times from my server, plopped it into the external USB drive, filled it with content, then put it back into the server without any issues. At that time, I wasn't using Drivepool though.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, some USB enclosures do this.  You need to use the drive in the enclosure you formatted the drive with (or that it came with), and then move the data off of that drive. 

 

 

 

SOLVED: It looks it like it came from creating the GPT partition inside of a USB enclosure than transferring it to an internal SATA port. No idea how to fix the partition yet without losing data but its not Stablebits issue.

 

So moving the drive back should fix the issue temporarily. Removing the disk from the pool, moving it over, repartitioning it and the re-adding it to the pool is about the only thing you can really do here. 

 

 

 

And this is one of the reasons I'm very picky about USB drives. This *exact* reason, actually. 

[dslabbekoorn]

Sorry to bring up an old post but I had a massive power outage & surge here due to a storm and when the server came back up the 3TB drive in a USB enclosure (Sabrent) showed as GPT Protected Partition and alot of un-allocated  space.  Unable to access or be seen by Drivepool or windows & you can't touch it.  Putting it back into the malfunctioning enclosure & it works fine and is seen by all.  Only problem is the drive runs full tilt all the time and overheats (passive cooling in the "working" enclosure)  How do I go about removing the drive from the pool and then making it usable in the new enclosure to re-partition and reformat?  The drive is locked (GPT protected partition) by any other method of connecting it to the computer.  Just don't want to lose 2+ TB of data or my hard drive.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.

 

[RetroG]

this to me sounds like what happens when a 512 sector disk is presented or converted (without reformatting/re-partitioning) to 4k sectors.

there are quite a few external chipsets that do this as this is a quick and dirty hack to get past the 2.2TB limit on MBR disks, which let's you use a full capacity drive on XP 32 bit where you otherwise couldn't (the other dirty hack is using no partition table, just ntfs at the start and end of the drive).

you need to use the matching enclosure or the partition table won't make sense. or expect to re-partition it. you would probably have to internalize the bridge board or temporarily remove it from the pool, repartition, re-add. you may or may not need to use diskpart's clean command to re-partition if you can't via the GUI.

(I am unaware of any way to access this kind of mismatched geometry in software on drives you can't convert to 4kn directly (via the HUGO or Seachest lite tools, it's worth trying these utilities (if your sata controller is at least 5 years old or newer) to see if they list 4k as possible on your drive however I haven't seen any 512e drive below 8TB that is convertible)).