Which Drive is Missing?

[HydeTDS]

Hi

I had an old server with two physical drives and a partition of that PC's C drive in a drivepool under windows 10.  All worked well for years.

I now have a new server using Windows 11 Pro.  In the upgrade I removed the partition section of the old PC from the pool, rebalanced and then shut everything down.

The new Windows 11 Pro mini PC uses an Oricon 4 drive bay external unit to house the three drives from the old PC.  I reformatted the old PC's physical C drive to have one primary volume.  So got rid of two hidden partitions and what was the old C drive NTFS partition.

Now, neither Stablebit Drivepool nor Windows Disk Management can 'see' that drive.  And yet, if I remove any one of the three physical drives in the external drive bay, the whole pool goes down and all pooled drives disappear from the Stablebit DP GUI.

I thought that if you pulled just one of the shared drives, only that drive would show as missing, but all the drives show as missing.  Why?

And how to get the old C drive to be detected by Windows?

TIA

[Shane]

Just to make sure I have this right, rephrased:

• For the old server:
  • You had an old Win 10 machine with (at least) three physical disks, I'm going to call them D#1, D#2 and D#3.
  • D#1 was the boot disk for the machine; it had the usual boot partitions/volumes (including one formatted as a NTFS volume, C drive) and either the C drive volume was part of the pool or there was a separate partition that was also formatted as a NTFS volume that was part of the pool; either way I'll call that volume V#1.
  • D#2 and D#3 were each formatted as a single NTFS volume, which I'll call V#2 and V#3 respectively, and those volumes were also part of the above pool.
• During the upgrade:
  • You first removed V#1 from the pool, then balanced the pool, then shut everything down.
• For the new server:
  • The new machine is running Win 11 Pro (and presumably DrivePool is installed).
  • You've connected the physical disks D#1, D#2 and D#3 from the old server to the new server via an Oricon external drive bay.
  • You've then redone D#1 to just have a single, new, NTFS volume which I'll call V#1a.

Is that all correct?

At this point DrivePool should be able to see a pool consisting of V#2 and V#3 (on D#2 and D#3) as well as an available non-pooled spare to add, V#1a (on D#1), since you don't mention adding the new volume to the pool yet.

However instead DrivePool can only see V#2 and V#3, and even Windows Disk Management cannot see V#1a (or even D#1?), and if you pull any one of D#1 thru D#3 the whole pool vanishes from the DrivePool GUI (when, I agree, the remaining disks should still be showing up)?

[HydeTDS]

Perfectly correct. 👍🏻

The only thing I'd add is that I had to use some command line diskpart instructions to get rid of the hidden partitions on D#1 and create the primary partition for the whole volume of that disk. I'm assuming that creating that primary partition also formats it as NTFS? Even if it doesn't, I'd still expect Disk Management to see it?

[HydeTDS]

Okay, I'm feeling a right Muppet, but still can't see how to correct this. 

Disk Management does see 3 physical drives, but one of them appears to have taken the identity of the virtual drive in my previous setup???

So now I have a physical drive labelled 'Use_Drivepool (Z:) in Disk Management but this doesn't appear as a drive to add to my pool. Instead StableBit lists it in the gui under the name of my PC (in my case, 'SERVER').

But I've no idea how to get the physical drive listed as available to the pool, or see a virtual drive made up of the 3 physical ones? 

Do I have a clash between the drive letter and path for the physical drive and the virtual pool drive? If so, how do I fix that?

Edited August 13 by HydeTDS
Further clarification

[HydeTDS]

Changing the drive letter for 'Use_Drivepool Z:' to 'X:' hasn't fundamentally changed anything. 😥

[Shane]

Hmm. Something does sound messed up there.

If it helps, pools created by DrivePool show up as Volumes and Disks in Windows Disk Management (WDM). Clicking on the Pool volume in the volume list (default upper half) of WDM should highlight the related (virtual) disk in the graphical view (default bottom half) of WDM. So if everything was healthy you should have a number of Disks in WDM equal to the number of physical disks in your machine plus the number of active pools, starting from Disk 0.

To start with I'd suggest powering off, pulling all three disks from the Orico, powering on, and checking WDM to see the results. Then repeat but with just the one suspicious disk put back in (D#1, not the others) and compare. The new disk in the second list should be that disk (though keep in mind that the number allocated to each disk may be different and the pool "disk" may also show up - it shouldn't, but it might). Then use DISKPART, LIST DISK, SELECT DISK # where # is the Disk number to select the suspicious disk and CLEAN to wipe that disk clean. Make sure you don't select the wrong disk! Then EXIT and use WDM (may need to use Action -> Rescan Disks first) to first initialise it as a GPT disk and second format it as a single NTFS volume. Then power down, put the other two good disks back in and see if that's sorted it.

[HydeTDS]

Stopping all StableBit services then powering down the server, switching off the drive bay device is something I did to change the drive letter from Z: to X: and back again, didn't change anything. 

I think it's time to open an official support request. 😆