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Lost all my shared folders

teesee150teesee150
edited March 2012 in DrivePool
I'm running Drivepool v5536

I had 3 2TB hard drives up and running. I had the following drives:
C:
D: What has left of the 2TB from the system drive
E: 2TB hard drive
F: 2TB hard drive
G: - Represented pool

I filled the pool up about 80% and then put another formatted 2TB drive in the system. I immediately upon bootup got errors stating all my shared folders were missing. The new drive took the drive letter G: and the pool moved to drive letter H:. I tried removing the harddrive and the pool stayed at H: and I still have no folders.

The Server Folders tab says Unknown for Free Space and Missing for status on all folders. Pool condition is stated as 100% at at the bottom, and the pie graph is only showing about 200mb of data usage.

The Pool tab shows the drives correctly, the pool usage is reported correctly under this tab.

If I RDP into the server, I can go to Explorer and see all the files on the pool (H:) under H:\ServerFolders\ and all the data appears to be intact. I just have no idea how to get the server to recognize this. I assume everything got botched since my Drivepool switched from G: to H: when I put the fourth drive into the system.

I cannot see the folders via a network share either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I tried searching and wasn't able to come up with anyone that had the same problem.



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Comments

  • teesee150teesee150
    Member
    I got my folders back by going into disk management and manually changing the pool back to Drive G: and restarting.

    What is the proper way to add a hard drive so this doesn't happen again in the future, or was it just a fluke with Drivepool?
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  • teesee150teesee150
    Member
    Everytime I try connect the new disk to the system, I'm getting this problem. Any suggestions?
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  • SilverRubiconSilverRubicon
    edited March 2012 Member
    I'd suggest not assigning drive letters to your drives.  They're archaic and DP does a great job of eliminating the need for them.
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  • teesee150teesee150
    Member
    I was able to get it to work by deleting the volume on the new drive and letting drivepool format the drive.

    Is there anyway to remove the drive letters after the drives have been added to a pool or is it too late?
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  • ShaneShane
    edited March 2012 Resident Guru
    Archaisms aside, this is a bug (perhaps a Windows bug, but if so, unless/until Microsoft fixes it, DrivePool needs to work around it).

    teesee150, please let Alex know directly? http://stablebit.com/contact
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  • ShaneShane
    Resident Guru
    Remote into your server, remove the drive letters from disks (but not the DrivePool drive) using Disk Management, then immediately reboot. DrivePool will still find and use the disks.

    Note: drives without letters will not show up in the "Hard Drives" tab of the "Server Folders and Hard Drives" section of the Dashboard, and their contents will not be explorable through Windows. They will still be listed by the "Pool" tab and their pool content will still be explorable through the DrivePool drive/shares.
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  • ShaneShane
    Resident Guru
    P.S. I've let Alex know of this issue.
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  • AlexAlex
    edited March 2012 Covecube
    The short of it is, DrivePool doesn't assign drive letters.

    And this is why...

    The way that all self-respecing and well behaved virtual file systems are supposed to handle this, is to defer volume mount point assignment to the kernel mount point manger.

    The mount manager is a kernel component that works with the Windows storage stack to assign persistent drive letters to any arriving volumes.

    It does this in a standard way that works with the Virtual Disk Service API (the API that Disk Management uses), and so is compatible with all Windows applications that depend on that API.

    I've seen other virtual drive products that don't follow this convention, and admittedly prior to M3, DrivePool didn't either. You can typically see this if you need to choose a drive letter for your virtual drive. That's not how real drives work. For DrivePool M4, to re-assign drive letters, you do that from the Disk Management snap-in.

    So that's the rationale for DrivePool M4 not managing drive letter assignments.

    So how is Windows supposed to do it?

    Well, it's supposed to query the disk for various parameters and such so that it could identify it uniquely and then store some magic values in the registry, where upon boot up it should be able to determine what volume gets what drive letter.

    What happens if drive letter assignments change in WHS?

    Everything breaks.

    Namely, the shared folders work by pointing to a particular path (such as, G:\ServerFolders\Documents), so all the shares will disappear. Other things will break as well, client backups will not work, HomeGroups will have trouble, etc...

    You do not want to re-assign drive letters in WHS, unless the drive is completely empty.

    I'll keep an eye out for this issue.
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