How to locate file location on specific HDD in DrivePool?

[gtaus]

I ran into a problem building up my DrivePool for my Plex/Kodi server. In DrivePool, Kodi, for example, reports that some of the movie files have "Invalid Arguement" and will not load/play. After reading error reports on Kodi support forums, I see the problem might be that Kodi cannot see USB drives connected to the server via a USB hub whereas USB drives that are directly connected are read normally.

In my DrivePool, I have 1 folder designated to hold my movie files. I currently have 14 USB HDDs in my DrivePool. I have 2 MediaSonic 4 bay ProBox units housing 7 drives, and I believe they are considered a direct connect because they do not go through any external USB hub before connecting into the computer. I have added 7 USB HDDs into DrivePool using a USB hub because I only have 4 USB 3.0 direct connect ports. It appears that my movie files on those HDDs connected via USB hub were added fine to DrivePool, but Kodi cannot load/play them from behind the USB hub connection.

So, I am at the point where I am trying to find the exact location (on which HDD) the files reporting "Invalid Argument" in my DrivePool. I would be able to determine if that file was on a HDD connected to the USB hub or not, and that would help me with my troubleshooting.  I imagine the file could currently be on any one of the 14 HDDs in the DrivePool. Is there any easy way to determine the exact HDD where the file resides? If not, I suppose I can open up each HDD and manually look into the PoolPart directory. But I am hoping that someone else has seen this issue and may be able to offer some suggestions. Thanks in advance.

[Shane]

I'd suggest a tool called Everything, by Voidtools. It'll scan the disks (defaults to all NTFS volumes) then just type in a string (e.g. "exam 2020" or ".od3") and it shows all files (you can also set it to search folder names as well) that have that string in the name, with the complete path. Also useful for "I can't remember what I called that file or where I saved it, but I know I saved it on the 15th..." problems.

[gtaus]

Thanks. I download Everything by Voidtools and tried it out. It appears that it is exactly what I was looking for in a search program. The only issue I have at this point with the program is that it did not scan and index any of my DrivePool HDDs because I removed all the Drive Letters assigned to the DrivePool HDDs. As a test, I reassigned a Drive Letter to one of the DrivePool HDDs, and Everything scanned and indexed it just fine. I am hoping that Everything has some way of scanning HDDs with no Drive Letter assignment, but if not, I will temporarily reassign drive letters to the HDDs while I troubleshoot my Plex/Kodi server issue.

I posted a question on the Everything forum about scanning HDDs with no Drive Letter assigned to them. My DrivePool has 14 HDDs and I removed the Drive Letter assignments on those HDDs to clean up my File Explorer desktop. However, if you are familiar with both DrivePool and Everything, do you know if it is possible for Everything to scan HDDs without Drive Letter assignments?

Again, thanks for the suggestion on Everything by Voidtools which I think will be the tool I need for my troubleshooting.

[Shane]

You could use Disk Management in Windows to mount the drives as folders on another drive instead of having their own letters. Everything could then still automatically find and scan the drives. Pick (empty) folders with names that will let you easily identify the corresponding drives. I've verified this works on my own server.

For example, create a folder on your C: drive called Disks, then create empty sub-folders under Disks for each of your pooled drives, e.g. d0, d1, d2, d3, then mount those drives to those sub-folders. All done.

Keep in mind that if you removed the drive letters for other reasons (e.g. to prevent them being scanned directly by AV or whatever) then you may want to consider whether you can exclude the mounted folder(s) from whatever it is you want to avoid.