Duplication Inconsistent

[DGilmour]

Hello,

 

 

I am in the process of moving my drive pool disks from an old PC over to a new one.  At the same time I have expanded the pools by adding some new disks.

 

I am experiencing two problems with the pool that I have labelled "DrivePool - With Dupe":

 

- One of the disks in this pool is listed both as both Pooled and Non-Pooled.  If I click on the 'Add' link beside its entry in the non-pooled list, I get an error message saying in effect that a disk cannot be added to a pool in which it is already present.

 

- Duplication for this pool halts with a "Duplication Inconsistent" message.

 

I have attached a screen shot.

 

I have tried re-booting.

 

I have run CHKDSK on all disks in the pool, and all pass without error.  Harddisk Sentinel advises that disk L is unreliable, so I have unchecked the two boxes for it in the Drive Usage Limiter balancer, so that it will empty on rebalancing.  I do not know why DrivePool has also set the two targets for drive K also to 0%.  All other balancer settings are defaults.  

 

When I check the log file, its last 57K lines marked [FileDuplication] read "Error checking file filename for duplication consistency. The system cannot find the file specified .."

 

I am looking for advice on how to clear up these errors.

 

 

Thank you!

 

David

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This looks like a "VDS" (Virtual Disk Service) error, but as you've tried rebooting already, it may be an issue with StableBit DrivePool.

 

Click on the "Gear" icon in the UI, open the "troubleshooting" section and select "Reset settings". 

You'll need to reconfigure the balancing options, as this will reset those as well.

 

 

As for the rest of the issues, could you see if they persist after restarting?
Also, do you have StableBit Scanner installed on the system as well?

[DGilmour]

So far so good, after using "Reset Settings".  I had to reboot a couple of times afterward to get rid of some glitches (e.g., Drivepool reported that its Service had not started, although the Services applet showed that it was running), but now things are looking like they are back on track.

 

See the attached screen shot.

 

There is no longer a duplicate of a Pooled drive listed under Non-Pooled.  

 

Yes, I do have StableBit Scanner installed.  It is still making its way though the process of scanning all the drives.  It has now completed scanning drive K and reports some problems, which perhaps explains the zeroed targets that appeared for the drive in DrivePool before Scanner had finished scanning it.  Scanner has not scanned drive L yet, but I expect that when it does, it will concur with Harddisk Sentinel, and zero that drive's targets as well.

 

The Measuring process for this pool completed without error.  Balancing is proceeding without error so far.

 

I assume that Duplication of the remaining Unduplicated files did not occur before Balancing because the balancer that wants to clear the files off of drive K has priority.  I assume that, unless I override that balancer, I will have to wait until K is cleared before I will see whether I am still getting the Duplication Inconsistent error.  Since all files on K are duplicated, it looks like it is safe for me to defer the clearing of that drive.

 

My priority for now should be to Duplicate the remaining Unduplicated files on L, since HD Sentinel has reported that it is weak.

 

So, for now, unless you have different advice on how I should proceed, I will turn off the StableBit Scanner balancer, and will see whether that forces the Duplication process to start.  

 

In any case, once I can see whether or not the Duplication process is working and no longer reporting the Duplication Inconsistent error, I will report back here with an update.

 

Thank you for your help.

 

 

David

[Christopher (Drashna)]

If StableBit Scanner detects damaged sectors (sectors it cannot read), then by default, StableBit DrivePool will automatically attempt to evacuate the drive. That appears to be what is happening, and is why I asked if you had StableBit Scanner installed.

 

And this will start even before the scan is completed on the drive.

 

However, instead of turning off the StableBit Scanner balancer, I would recommend opening it's settings. You can uncheck the "move duplicated data" option there, so that only unduplicated data is moved off of the drive. This means that if the drive fails, you don't lose any data. But the pool will have to reduplicate files.

 

 

Also, on the drive in question (K:), does it have any SMART warnings as well? Specifically "uncorrectable sector count" or "Pending sector count"? If so, you may want to replace the drive. 

[DGilmour]

Duplication completed with no errors, so "Reset Settings" did solve all of the issues that I was seeing.  See the attached screen shot.

 

Thanks for the tip on the StableBit Scanner balancer settings.  

 

Now that duplication is complete, I have set that balancer back to its default settings.  As you can see in the screenshot, although it has not completed scanning L drive, Scanner wants DrivePool to evacuate both K and L drives, as expected.  

 

The reason that I upgraded the CPU box running my file server was that the old one, a 2007 vintage budget machine, besides being very slow, couldn't handle hard drives larger than 2TB.  I knew that some of the drives in my pools were starting to fail.  The new CPU box will enable me to take advantage of some 3TB drives that I picked up, and faster processing, to get the data in my drive pools quickly and safely reorganized, so that I can remove those bad disks from the pools before any data is lost.  The application problems that I had originally reported were the only things holding that project up.  Thanks again for your help in getting those issues quickly fixed.

 

David

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, I'm glad to hear that it looks like everything is working properly then. 

 

 

And it definitely sounds like you needed an upgrade.

 

And definitely do replace those damaged drives. If they're still under warranty, you may be able to RMA them.