Drives cannot be detected by DrivePool, how to get them to be detected?

[DrivePoolfan]

I sent the following to support earlier but haven't heard back, and since I am desperate I am posting here, hoping for a faster response/feedback:

Issue: Two of my drives have disappeared from a 3-drive Pool this morning.

 

Suspected Culprit: The new SATA cables that I put in this morning are bad?

 

Troubleshooting performed: The two drives are still detected by Windows in Disk Management I can browse to them with Windows Explorer. Checkdisk and Stablebit Scanner also found these to have no problems. Also replaced suspected bad cables with known good cables.

 

More Details:

 

a.  Currently, Explorer on Windows 11 shows the contents of these 2 drives (Usually found.000 is a result of some kind of failure that caused chkdsk to rename the folders)

 

b. Although Windows Explorer and Stablebit Scanner do detect these drives, DrivePool app just does not detect these two drives, ie. not listed in Pooled or Non-Pooled list

 

c. All my files seem to be still on the disks inside the found.000 folder but they are scattered all over with some additional random sub-folders like 200000_dir.chk and 300000_dir.chk -- arghhhhh, it will take me hours to sort them back to the original folder structure but at least all of the data are there, ie. 15TB or so.

 

d. These are not dynamic disks.

 

e. Duplication is off

 

Questions:

 

1. Is my suspicion correct about SATA cables? Would SATA cables cause this kind of damage or this is something caused by DrivePool?

 

2. I am aware and have done this procedure described here before: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4142489 to manually move my files into the Poolpart.xxx folders. But if my two drives are not even detected or listed by DrivePool in Pooled or Non-Pooled, how do I move the correct files inside Found.000 into the correct Poolpart.xxx folders?

 

3. I know that reformatting these 2 drives will for sure get DrivePool to detect and list them in Non-Pooled, but I have 15TB of data so I really DO NOT want to copy these to other backup drives and then copy back. So is there something more direct that I can do to get these 2 drives join the original Pool?

 

Additionally Troubleshooting Steps Performed:

 

1. Assigned letter to Drives -- can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

2. Enabled Automount command in Windows -- can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

3. Mount drive in a folder -- can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

 

4. Uninstall and Reinstall latest release version v2.2.5.1237 -- can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

5. Copy the "Poolpart.xxxx" name from the working drive to the other 2 undetected drives, uninstall DrivePool and reinstall DrivePool  -- can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

 

6. Moved the 2 drives in question to different SATA ports and move other working drives to SATA ports in question -- after ruling out damaged SATA ports and SATA cables, still can't make DrivePool to recognize the 2 drives

 

What else can I do?! I need my Pool back!

 

 

[Jonibhoni]

Any hint in the gear icon in upper right -> Troubleshooting -> Service Log?

Check right after system restart and scroll to the very top, to see the part where DrivePool detects existing pools. (Maybe temporarily deactivate Service tracing / auto-scroll right after opening the log, to prevent the interesting lines to move out of view.)

And, just out of curiosity, are there any other pools shown in the UI? (click your pool's name in the top center in the main window)

And - also just another wild guess - are the two missing drives shown if you start your computer without the working drive plugged in? (Disclaimer: Do at your own risk. I'm just an ordinary user!)

[DrivePoolfan]

Support suggested that I reset all settings.

I did and it did not fix everything but at least it was a good start.

 

Now, the original Pool reappeared but only one of the 3 original drives was randomly listed in Pooled, and the other two were listed in Non-pooled.

 

Trying to add these Non-Pooled drives would create some kind of "cannot add drives again" error.

 

In the end, I had to remove every Pooled drive from the "original pool" by restarting service, seeing a new random drive listed in Pooled, removing it and restarting service until all drives are removed from original pool.

 

Finally then I created a new pool, and moved all files from the original pool folders into the new pooled folders.

 

What a pain but it was not hard, at least I got all my files back without losing anything, which was shocking.

 

Please give me a like if this post has helped or will help anyone who run into similar issues.