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2-way mirror storage space, two drives failed

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 11:06 pm
by RichyRoo
Hi All; looking for some advice.

I had 6*3Tb drives in a 2-way mirrror storage space ReFS formatted.
One drive failed hard (total hardware failure, cant access it)
I managed to corrupt the replacement drive through sheer stupidity (dont ask) and so now SS thinks that drive is missing too and because of the nature of my stupidity I cant reconnect it. (I did this: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo ... erverfiles)
The SS has gone into 'Innacessible; reattach drives' mode and nothing I can do in Powershell will fix it.
I have since added 2 new 3Tb drives in the hope that it would magically fix itself, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

The two dead drives only have 0.4% filled, so I am happy to lose whatever information was on them.
The SS only has one column, so I think I am ok and there is no striping of the files (I hope).

I am looking for a solution to either:
1) Force SS to abandon the two dead drives and lose whatever information depended on them in order to get the SS back up and running
2) Extract the data from the remaining 5 healthy drives, preferably with Folder structure (these are perfectly fine, no deletions or anything, just ReFS)

I tried using powershell to force the removal of the 2 disconnected drives from the Pool but it wouldnt let me:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Remove-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName 'Storage Pool' -PhysicalDisks $disks[5]

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Removing a physical disk will cause problems with the fault tolerance capabilities of the following
storage pool: "Storage pool".
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "Y"): A
Remove-PhysicalDisk : The storage pool could not complete the operation because the health or operational status of
one or more virtual disks in it does not permit it.
Activity ID: {3fe51e85-47f6-40b1-ac24-4a620fceb28f}
At line:1 char:1
+ Remove-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName 'Storage Pool' -Physical ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (StorageWMI:ROOT/Microsoft/..._StorageCmdlets) [Remove-PhysicalDisk], CimE
xception
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : StorageWMI 48011,Remove-PhysicalDisk



I have used the R-Studio demo to scan the 5 remaining drives, but its not finding the folder structures for some reason and it cant fix the StorageSpace since I dont have the missing drives to reconnect.

Anyone have any ideas?

Re: 2-way mirror storage space, two drives failed

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2016 10:52 pm
by RichyRoo
Elena at Reclaime.com was able to manually rewrite the config files on the drives which had been borked and we were able to retrieve almost all the data. Turns out there is no documentation for either SS or ReFs but the genius' at Reclaime have reverse engineered an understanding of how it works.

For future reference, the first rule of Storage Spaces is NEVER USE STORAGE SPACES, the second rule of Storage Spaces is NEVER USE STORAGE SPACES and the third rule is WHEN STORAGE SPACES BREAKS (AND IT WILL) VISIT www.reclaime.com and they can help you.

So thanks for nothing Microsoft for solving the issues caused by your buggy, fragile and undocumented mess of a system.

Re: 2-way mirror storage space, two drives failed

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2016 5:14 am
by Alt
Did you try to connect all the disks or their images to R-Studio? It would have been able to create the WSS automatically.