A mess

[Kachoobs]

I've just started a new pool with drivepool, but it's kind of a mess. 

One of the drives I've added is damaged and was mislabelled, we thought it was a good drive but it wasn't. Anyway it has the bulk of data is on this drive with a handful of damaged sectors. We previously removed the drive we thought was damaged, leaving the bulk of the pool data on this actually damaged drive. The good drive is back in the pool along with a 3rd good drive. I've tried everything to get drivepool to duplicate the data back to a good drive. Not to mention another USB drive that's fine but just slow transfer rates. Drivepool won't do anything. I've left it for days, no duplication. I've run chkdsk. I've triggered and changed duplication settings. A bunch of resets. I've even deleted the files it presents in the 'pool organization warnings' which it says it can't read. I've tried every removal option for the damaged drive to even just get it out of the pool and manually connect it afterwards and get the good data from it I can but the same error presents which is 'the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable', which isn't true because I can manually access almost all of the files on this drive. I just need to get everything duplicated before it carks it for good. Drivepool is just doing nothing. My last resort is to just unplug it and remove it as a missing drive but the crucial part is that the data that is good on other drives will not duplicate across to a second drive.

Any  assistance appreciated.

[Shane]

I'd suspect some of the NTFS permissions on the drive have been damaged given you as a user can read the files but drivepool can't (note chkdsk does not fix ACLs).

One way I'd tackle it:

• make sure nobody/nothing is using the pool
• "ignore" the bad drive on the pool - from an administrator command prompt, run:
  • dpcmd -ignore-poolpart poolpath UID
  • where poolpath is the path to the pool (e.g. "P:\") and UID is the name of the hidden poolpart folder on the bad drive (e.g. "PoolPart.123-abc")
  • its content will disappear from the pool but still be on the drive itself, and the pool will alert that the drive is "missing"
  • if this doesn't work: turn off the computer, unplug the bad drive, turn the computer back on, remove the missing drive, plug the bad drive into a non-drivepool computer networked to the drivepool computer and proceed as below adapted as necessary (e.g. by sharing the pool and mapping a network drive to it)
• remove the missing bad drive from the pool
  • if this doesn't work, you might have damaged permissions on one or more of your "good drives" - see https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5810-ntfs-permissions-and-drivepool/
• copy only the user content inside the hidden poolpart folder of the bad drive to the pool, excluding system folders, drivepool metadata, stripping ACLs and skipping files already at the destination
  • e.g. assuming you aren't using nested pools, you could use:
    • robocopy "m:\poolpart.abc-123\" "p:\" /dcopy:dat /copy:dat /e /xc /xn /xo /xx  /xd "System Volume Information" /xd "$RECYCLE.BIN" /xd ".covefs"
  • it's important to include the backslashes at the end of the source and target paths
  • if you're wondering, "extra" files are files that were found only on the destination
  • if you're concerned that you might not have the command exactly how you want, instead of starting with robocopy start with robocopy /L (this is basically test mode, it shows you what it would do without actually doing it)
• confirm that pool is now working properly and all user content is present.
  • if pool still gives unreadable errors, see https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5810-ntfs-permissions-and-drivepool/
  • if pool still won't duplicate... ouch, I'd try starting a new pool and migraring all your content across.

Hope this helps!