Everything was working fine, then I listened to ChatGPT

[igobythisname]

My Beelink mini-pc running Win11 Pro and DrivePool v2.3.13.1687...

i have 2x Sabrent 5 bay usb 3.2 gen 2, dock #1 filled with 5 drives, and dock #2 filled with 3 (the docks were daisy chained), + 2x samsung ssd (cache drives, connected via usb-one connected directly into the beelink, the other was connected in the 2nd usb-c slot behind a Sabrent dock);

for many months now, DrivePool has been showing several drives under 'Non-Pooled' but these drives are actually apart of the pool; i didn't have any issues with my data or DrivePool G:\, so I left it as is;

i had a very successful run of setting up WSL 2 + Docker Containers on Win11 Pro using ChatGPT! that I asked it: "some disks that are apart of the pool are showing as non-pooled, why is that?"

it returned:

TL;DR

Most likely:

✔ Drive is detected by Windows
✔ DrivePool just hasn’t reattached it
✔ Data is still safe
✔ Click Add to Pool or restart DrivePool service

Not a failure.

////

so I clicked on Add to Pool on the disks under Non-Pooled.

shortly after, one after another drives were showing as "Missing", until all 3 drives in dock #2 showed "missing";

i checked the drives in Windows Disk Management, it asked me to 'initialize' the disks, and I let it; and slowly my just-fine working DrivePool felt like it got corrupted and thus my nightmare began.

at the moment, i've completely detached dock #2; i have dock #1 and the 2x cache disks connected; I removed dock #2 disks from Drivepool; after DrivePool measuring/duplicating; DrivePool ended with "Missing Disk" saying 1of2 cache disks was missing; i was out of town and thought I detached it; i'm back with my hardware, the drive was connected the whole time; 

what should I do now? 😕

going back-I tried ChatGPT to recover the drives in dock #2; it had me try to recover the NTFS filesystem via TestDisk but that didn't seem to work so I just removed the 3x disks and am running with just dock #1 since I didn't have issues with those drives; i want to have a healthy drivepool so i can one-by-one add back dock #2 and the 3x disks; i'm confused why it now said 1of2 cache disks was missing? perhaps because i removed dock #2 and the cache disk was ext connected there, and now i removed dock #2 completely and have them connected in different ports?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

tl;dr:  Reset the settings in StableBit DrivePool:
https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B

 

The drives shouldn't appear as both pooled and unpooled.  Also, pooled drives shouldn't show up as (just) unpooled drives.    And in both cases, there may be some corruption of the local pool config (for the service).   While this isn't critical (eg, it shouldn't break anything), it's not supposed to happen.    Rebooting the system may fix this, as may restarting the service, as it should reload the information.   However, this doesn't always fix things, and in this case resetting the settings should fix this (as it clears out the locally saved settings and rebuilds the data from scratch, from the pooled drives)

If this keeps happening, though, open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/Contact and let us know.

[igobythisname]

something is wrong; i disconnected dock #2 with 3x drives (10TB, 10TB, 8TB); let DrivePool stabilize with just dock #1; removed and re-added 2x ssd cache drives; i reconnected dock #2 and the 3 drives, wiped them, reformatted, added them back to DrivePool; Reset DrivePool settings; I restarted my beelink mini-pc; 1x 10TB & 8TB drive now showing 'Non-Pooled' and all 3 drives in dock #2 have a phantom presence under Non-Pooled as well

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

DO NOT TOUCH THE UNINITIALIZED DISKS.   

Reconnecting the enclosure may be a good idea. But I would highly recommend running data recovery on them (such as test disk, recuva, etc), something that can recover the partition tables.  Any other action on the drives may/will overwrite the partition tables and make things that much more difficult to recover.