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Unable to remove failing drive


gtaus

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OK, first problem I have really encountered with DrivePool. Last night I had a 5TB HDD start to fail, hard. I got a notice from my drive monitoring program that the HDD's health was not good. So I went into the DrivePool GUI and selected to remove the failing HDD. Unfortunately, the HDD is not removing itself normally and I get an error "Error Removing Drive" with the Error Details "The system cannot find the path specified." At that point, DrivePool goes into a full pool Measuring task on all pool drives, which on my 70TB DrivePool takes ~2 hours.

I let DrivePool remeasure everything overnight, and this morning I tried once again to remove the failing drive from the DrivePool GUI. Again, after a few minutes, the failing drive errored out and DrivePool is once again measuring all drives on my 70TB pool - which will take another ~2 hours to complete.

Is there a better way to remove a failing drive from DrivePool? When I select remove the drive, there is a Remove Options checkbox that comes up and none of the 3 options are selected by default. Should I check any/all of those options and if so which boxes should I select. After my DrivePool has remeasured all the drives, I am planning on selecting the "Force damaged drive removal (unreadable files will be left on the disk)" option, but the other 2 options do not really seem to address my current problem.

Also, can I attempt another drive removal when DrivePool is "Measuring" the drives, or should I wait until the Measuring task (~2 hours) is complete? Thanks for any help.

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You can attempt a Remove while the pool is measuring. If you don't have drive evacuation enabled (and active!) via the Stablebit Scanner balancer for Drivepool, I would also turn off balancing.

Since the first two Remove attempts failed and the drive's health is failing, I personally would tick all three boxes on the next attempt.

If that also doesn't work, or only recovers some of the files, you could stop the DrivePool service and attempt to manually move the remaining content of the hidden poolpart folder on that drive into the hidden poolpart folders of other drives in the same pool. If you do this I suggest using a good moving/copying utility such as Teracopy or Fastcopy rather than the Windows' Explorer, and (if prompted) do NOT replace any existing files on the destination (since that should only be possible if you have duplication enabled, and if the drive is failing you might be replacing good files with bad files).

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Thanks, @Shane. My third attempt, ticking all the boxes also failed. So I stopped the DrivePool service and attempted to manually move the contents. Windows immediately gave me an error message to run chkdsk on the drive because it found errors. Unfortunately, I ran chkdsk as suggested and it wiped out my drive. I am now looking at a RAW drive in my Disk Management and Windows will not access it at all stating the directory file is corrupt and unreadable. That has never happened to me before with chkdsk, but as much as I would like to fault MS, I do know that this drive was failing fast and maybe there was too much damage on it before I ran chkdsk.

There is nothing so important on the drive that I cannot live without. All my original media files are backed up on HDDs sitting in the closet, and my important working files are backed up on a cloud service. I did find some free recovery software via YouTube called iCare Data Recovery Pro, which states it might be able to recover lost data on a RAW drive so I can copy it over to another good drive. I have that running right now but the estimated time to complete is over 2 hours, so I'll just let it run overnight and hope for something in the morning. That might save me some time in rebuilding the deleted data. One can only hope.

In a worst case scenario, that this drive bad drive is completely gone, how do I get DrivePool back into normal service? Currently my DrivePool drives are all greyed out, like it wants to Measure the pool, but it will not because the failed drive (DP07) is still listed there and cannot be removed. I would think there must be a way to recover from a sudden death of a HDD that is no longer readable. For example, if you physically remove the drive from the pool, will DrivePool just list the drive as missing and give you the option of rebuilding the pool without that drive? I still have access to my virtual DrivePool on drive letter J:, but everything is greyed out on the DrivePool GUI and appears to be a fault state (drives not measured, pie chart all greyed out, etc....).

Assuming my DP07 drive is totally gone, really only care about getting DrivePool back online and working normal. Any help appreciated. Thanks.

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Quoting myself: "I did find some free recovery software via YouTube called iCare Data Recovery Pro, which states it might be able to recover lost data on a RAW drive so I can copy it over to another good drive. I have that running right now but the estimated time to complete is over 2 hours, so I'll just let it run overnight and hope for something in the morning. That might save me some time in rebuilding the deleted data. One can only hope."

Turns out that the "free" version only lets you recover 1GB of data, if you want to recover more than that, you need the "premium" version at $70.00. They did not state that up front, of course, but I just found it on a review of the product. It may be worth the price for someone who has important data that is not backed up elsewhere, but that is not my case.

Turning my attention to rebuilding the DrivePool with the existing drives, if possible. Any help appreciated.

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After a couple of reboots, the DrivePool GUI gave me the option to remove the missing DP07 HDD. This time it removed the missing disk from the listing and is currently Measuring the pool. So it looks like everything will be back on line and all remaining files will be accounted for in my remaining 65.7TB pool in ~2 hours.

Just want to mention that the drive that went bad (DP07) went from 100% health to completely dead within 12 hours. Not much time to move data off a large 5TB drive. Also, in this case, DrivePool was unable to remove the drive successfully before it died. The bad drive went offline every time DrivePool attempted to move files off it and into good disks in the pool. In this case, DrivePool failed to move any files off this failing drive.

I have had one other experience with a failing drive in DrivePool. In that case, DrivePool was able to move all but 2 corrupt files off a 4TB failing HDD before it completely died. But that drive lasted almost 3 days from the warning.

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2 hours ago, Shane said:

Yeah, sadly drives can die in a variety of ways and some of them just don't give you enough - or any - warning. Glad to hear you have backups and didn't lose anything critical.

Thanks for your help. I started a new thread on how to plan for future HDD failures and recovery options. Other than Duplication of the pool/folder, DrivePool does not seem to have a built in recovery plan. But, like you said, I lost nothing critical and my important folders were duplicated.

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