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Reboot required to recognize newly added volumes/drives?


Jaga

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Was doing some testing last night and today, adding in volumes to the existing Pool I have, and noticed something odd.  When I used Disk Management in Windows to delete volumes off a SSD and then re-add them with a different size/letter, Drivepool doesn't show the new available volume in it's Non-Pooled list.

Tried closing/opening the GUI, stopping/starting the DP service, refreshing in Disk Management, rescanning the Device list, etc.  Is a full reboot required for newly-provisioned system disks/volumes to show up in the non-pooled list, or do I maybe have a glitch in the system?  It's the same SSD I was using for DP caching from yesterday, though I've rebooted since removing that functionality for it.

 

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I think I finally resolved this.  My best guess as to why drives weren't showing in Drivepool's un-pooled list is that they weren't being enumerated correctly.  Whether that was due to the SSD being split between a letter-assigned 64KB clusters volume (DP SSD Cache) and a custom L2 16KB volume (Primocache L2 cache, no letter/path), OR the fact I had several SnapRAID parity drives mounted at W: X: Y: and Z:..   I just don't know.

I disconnected all the USB drives, completely wiped the SSD volumes so it was a blank physical disk, and then re-created them.  Now it works, for whatever reason.  I think I'm going to investigate keeping the SnapRAID parity volumes out of the drive letter assignments if possible, since they can sleep if they want, and that might do wonky things to the rest of the order.

Mystery solved, or at least circumvented.

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Definitely weird things, yep.  This morning Drivepool still isn't seeing one of my four parity drives (external USB 3.0).  I'm not concerned about it though, since I added in several new volumes on a single SSD for more pool tests, and they showed up fine.  At least I know how to work around it now if it ever pops up again.

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I'll give that a shot.  Never hurts to dig into the details, and I learn every time I do.

Edit:  none of the drives are dynamic, all basic.  I'll delve into the troubleshooter output at some point.  It could just be that it's an older production W7 Pro installation that's gotten wonky over time.  Nothing pops up in a sfc /scannow check, anti-virus is completely disabled even across reboots, and Primocache isn't touching any drive except the boot drive.  Definitely weirdness.

After I noticed this happening, I moved all my drives to mount into folders which may or may not help.  If I see anything that I can directly relate to DP, I'll be sure to let you know.  Otherwise - just consider it an OS issue on my end.

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Nope, no joy there (though I was hopeful having forgotten that command).  The interesting part is that all of the external drives mount at boot just fine.  All are browsable and also show up in Scanner.  Drivepool seems to be the only part of the system not recognizing one of the externals.  I double-checked their drive properties so they were all identical as well.

I think since they're semi-permanent drives on the server, I'm going to try altering their device properties to Enable write caching on all of them, then do a cold boot and also power off their controllers.  Perhaps being less hot-swappable will help Drivepool to see them without issue.  It's just one out of the four at this point that isn't displaying in un-pooled drives.  And since it isn't ever going to be pooled, it's really a non-issue.  That is...  unless *you* would like to find root cause.  :) 

 

Update:  no luck on adding the write-caching policy to all, or with the cold boot and USB power disconnects.  The drives all show in the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media interface.  They all spin up and are browsable after a boot.  They're all in Disk Management with their policies correct.  And Scanner sees them all and is polling Smart data correctly.

Note the missing "Parity_4TB_1a" drive in the un-pooled list:

xiWLYoo.png

 

I'm a little stumped too.  Gotta be a logical reason for it.  But Windows registers the drive fine.  Up to you if you want to continue diagnosing - no skin off my teeth if you don't want to spin wheels on it.

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FYI - the missing drive automagically showed up after today's reboot.  Didn't do any other changes or touch Drivepool settings.  Funny thing is - the volume I'm caching FTP download parts onto disappeared at the same time.  And it's still working perfectly mounted into a root folder on C:

Is there a maximum number of volumes that Drivepool can see simultaneously?  It's the only thing I can think of at the moment.

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