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Is there an option 'uncreate' a pool?


ikon

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As the question implies, I would like to know if the process of creating a drive pool can be easily reversed. DP does a great job of letting you create a pool and add drives to it. What if I just want to reverse that process?

 

I know I can remove drives from a pool, but I don't think that's the same thing. If I remove a drive, DP has to go through all kinds of rigmarole to move the data to the drives remaining in the pool. What about just moving the files & folders to where they were on the same drive before the pool was created and deleting the DP related files & folders? I would think this could be done a lot more quickly than removing a drive. Possible?

 

Does deactivating a licence do this?

 

Alternatively, is there a way to simply delete a pool?

 

What about shutting down Stablebit DrivePool Service and reformatting the drives that are in the pool? Maybe I could just move the files in the hidden folder up to the root and delete the pool related files manually?

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Two works for you Ikon: Trouble Maker. :)

 

Because I had to double check to see if this would even work first... (because I wasn't sure).

  1. Stop the DrivePool Service (and any service that may be using the files from the pool)
  2. Move the files out of the hidden "PoolPart" folders
  3. Delete said PoolPart folders.
  4. Start the DrivePool Service

You'll see an empty DrivePool drive until you start the service backup. But I can confirm this definitely does work.

However, it did not like messing with the "system volume information" folders in these poolPart folders. You probably will need to take ownership of the folder, and then delete it to get it to work/delete.

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I did try that. It worked up to a point. I, too, had issues with the $recyclebin and System Volume Information folders. Rather than mess around with it, I went into Disk Mangler and deleted the volumes from all 3 drives in the pool, rebooted, then recreated the pool.

 

All went well except I now have an issue I've never had with DP (admittedly, I'm a DP noob): on the newly created (recreated??) pool, I'm getting disks dropping out -- DP is saying the Disk is missing. I'm trying to track down what's going on.



Also, when I try to copy a file to the recreated pool I get an error that there isn't enough disk space. Getting the Properties of the drive using Windows Explorer shows over 2TB of space available. DP Manager also shows tons of space available.

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Taking ownership of the folders usually works, but yeah, it can be an issue dealing with.

 

Also, what OS are you using, and what version of DrivePool?

 

As for the disk dropouts, are the drives actually still present?

Event viewer show any disk related errors?

 

As for the "not enough disk space", that's an odd one. Could you enable tracing and duplicate the error?

v1.3: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Log_Collection

v:2.x: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection

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It's WHS2011 with DP 2.0.0.420.

 

Yeah, the drives are still present individually. I can access them via Windows Explorer. But, often, I can't access the DP drive letter from Windows Explorer that incorporates those drives.

 

Unfortunately, this is my OffSite backup, so I can't do as much experimenting as I would normally do, so I think trying to duplicate the problem is probably a non-starter. I may be able to do something along this line with different disks; but that's the rub, they would be different disks.

 

Given all the issues using DP to pool these drives, I've wiped them out again by Cleaning them with Diskpart and set my EX-503 enclosure to Span the disks together. So, they are no longer pooled using DP.

 

I'm doing yet another RoboCopy of the data over from my NearLine storage to the OffSite to see if I run into any of the same issues. If not, I'm going to have to assume there is some issue with DP.

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Two works for you Ikon: Trouble Maker. :)

 

Because I had to double check to see if this would even work first... (because I wasn't sure).

  1. Stop the DrivePool Service (and any service that may be using the files from the pool)
  2. Move the files out of the hidden "PoolPart" folders
  3. Delete said PoolPart folders.
  4. Start the DrivePool Service

You'll see an empty DrivePool drive until you start the service backup. But I can confirm this definitely does work.

However, it did not like messing with the "system volume information" folders in these poolPart folders. You probably will need to take ownership of the folder, and then delete it to get it to work/delete.

Just thinking about this after step 2 would it not be more prudent to then remove the drive from the pool from within the program, before step 3. In theory this would hopefully guarantee no "disk missing" messages.

I only mention this as I have always done the drag and drop "shortcut" whenever I having been moving lots of data. Often this has led to permission issues down the line. 

Today was the first time I let the program actually migrate the data for me and it went 100% flawlessly.  :) It was a lesson learned for me...No more cheats and shortcuts... Well not today anyway.  :lol:

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I found this thread in hopes to find the same answer.  Ultimately I did not try what was posted, but figured I would put in what I did.

 

Backstory:

I had a Pool with 2 x 2TB drives.  One was a 5400 rpm and the other a 7200 rpm.  I wanted to replace the 5400 with another 7200.

 

So I removed the 5400 from the pool was ready to add my new 7200 in it's place.  DrivePool started "checking" the 2TB drive still in the pool and got all the way to 97.6% at which point it was stuck and stayed at 97.6% for 6 hours.  So I copied the directories off out of the pool to an external HDD.  I know DrivePool wouldn't have removed the files, but I wanted to be safe.  I removed the initial 7200 from the pool, but the pool still existed.  Nowhere could I find an option to delete/remove the pool.  I did my searches tried to find everything I could on how to delete a DP pool and eventually found this thread.  Ultimately I rebooted my server with no drives in the pool and once back in the pool was gone.  So I formatted the first 7200, created a new pool, added in the new 7200 and added it to the pool.  I am currently in the process of recreating the shares, and then moving my data back to the pool.

 

I assume this is ultimately by design, but I guess I had just figured if I created a pool I would then have to remove/delete that same pool.  What I learned though is if there isn't a drive assigned to a pool it will be removed.  I hope this helps anyone looking to for the answer to "How do you delete a pool in DrivePool?"

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