Missing disk in DrivePool after removing driveletter

[TomG]

2 days ago I noticed that my DrivePool was (almost) empty. After opening DrivePool it stated all except 1 drive were missing.

I have 6 drives in my pool, one with a driveletter assigned to it, the other 5 without.
The one with a driveletter is used as a "download-disk" and I need to access folders on this drive. The rest of the drives are 100% pooldata and I don't need to access them individual. This way "This PC" stays clean without too many drives.

All the drives without a driveletter were missing in drivepool.
After adding a driveletter to them and removing them from the drivepool they were back and the pool was complete.

Every time I remove a driveletter from a datadisk it will disappear in DrivePool after a reboot. When assigning a driveletter to the disk and removing the drive from the pool, it reappears.

I already tried the Reset all Settings function, but DrivePool would hang.
I also tried to remove DrivePool and re-install the programm, but here I got a notice saying that the service can't be stopped.
After I delete the folder-shares on the DrivePool I was able to uninstall DrivePool.

After a new installation DrivePool recognized the complete pool without having to re-add the drives. Although, after removing a driveletter from a datadisk and a reboot, the original problem resurfaced...

I checked all the disks and partitions on it, they all seem to be fine. chkdsk won't find any problems. I checked all the cables on the drives and the mainboard.
I'm running out of ideas to try.

Yes I can live with driveletters assigned to my datadisks, but it worked fine until 2 days ago. I just want to find out what happened.
Does anyone recognize this problem and how did you fix it?

[TomG]

For what it's worth, I managed to find a solution to my problem. It was a problem in Windows that somehow the automount of drives was set to disabled.

Trying to find a solution for a non-DrivePool related problem I manually executed a command to enable the automount of drives.
As a test I removed the driveletters from my drives with solely Pooldata on them. After a reboot the drives still show up in DrivePool.

What I did:
1) open an elevated Command Prompt (cmd)
2) type diskpart
3) type automount enable
4) reboot

[Christopher (Drashna)]

We've seen this behavior happen from time to time, and it's pretty bizarre. 

Mounting the drives to a folder path may help:
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4822624

But if it doesn't, then re-adding drive letters will. 

[TomG]

Hello Christopher,

Thank you for your reply.
Is it correct that, after a new installation, DrivePool recognizes a complete pool of multiple hard drives solely by the (hidden) Poolpart folder?
I didn't even had to create a new pool or add hard drives after the installation.

Why I'm asking: I'm wondering if I completely erased everything (every setting) from the old installation with an un-install and some manual deleting of leftover folders.
Perhaps that something in the settings went rogue, but remained after a new installation and therefor I'm having this problem, even after a new installation.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

On 4/3/2018 at 12:04 PM, TomG said:

Is it correct that, after a new installation, DrivePool recognizes a complete pool of multiple hard drives solely by the (hidden) Poolpart folder?
I didn't even had to create a new pool or add hard drives after the installation.

Yes.
It's designed this way to make recovery super simple. 
WHSv1's Drive Extender (which was the inspiration for our product) was a nightmare to recover from, I have links if you want to see ....  So, we wanted it to be simple. 

On 4/3/2018 at 12:04 PM, TomG said:

Why I'm asking: I'm wondering if I completely erased everything (every setting) from the old installation with an un-install and some manual deleting of leftover folders.
Perhaps that something in the settings went rogue, but remained after a new installation and therefor I'm having this problem, even after a new installation.

If you removed the hidden PoolPart.xxxx folder, then yes, that would cause issues, since the Pool information is attached to that folder, using a hidden file system structure (Alternate Data Streams).  So if you messed with that, then the disk would no longer show up as a pooled disk. 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That was the command I was struggling to find.  I'd run into that issue a long while ago, and couldn't remember how to do it.  Documented for future issues. 

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_F3540