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Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:13 pm
by kingofheartsx44
I have Windows 10 Pro workstation computer, which I had been using to store full system backups and archived files for website projects I have worked on. The setup has been working nicely for well over a year. There are 6x3TB hard drives configured with Windows storage spaces in a 2-way mirror. All 6 drives are still functional. I had also set up Deduplication (ported from server 2012).

Last week, a computer glitch -- either windows update or something else -- corrupted the file index. The storage space no longer displays in Windows via disk management or in the storage spaces management console. I was able to recover the files with relative ease (and a lot of patience) using another piece of software, but that software did not support deduplication. Any files that were deduped are not accessible.

Using R-Studio, I am able to view the storage spaces volumes in the list, but I'm not sure what to do next. When I try to scan the storage space for files, it gives me a ton of errors like this one: "Read disk at position 283901952 failed after 1 attempts. Not enough RAID disks to perform I/O." It still finds some files after running for a long while, but there is a good chunk of them that is missing. I'm not really sure where there problem lies or what to try next. All 6 disks are connected and working. My initial thought is that it is trying to use RAID 5 and it should be using something else.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 6:52 am
by Alt
Looks like a hardware problem with the disk(s). What is the SMART status of the disks?

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 6:53 am
by Corsari
Hello

Same as Alt :-)

Have you run SMART test of every single drive?

You have it available in the R-Studio menu

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 7:33 pm
by kingofheartsx44
SMART status is Good on all 6 drives.

If I had to guess, I would say it's complaining because it thinks one of the disks is missing or doesn't quite understand the parity structure. Not sure though.

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 7:22 am
by Data-Medics
SMART status isn't always 100% reliable. Sounds like you've got a bad sector disk. Your first step should be to clone all the disks to good healthy drives. In the process of doing that you'll probably find one or two that have a patch of bad sectors. For those you should use ddrescue or hddsuperclone in Linux to clone around the bad sectors. Also, if the data is very important you might consider professional recovery.

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2017 10:58 pm
by kingofheartsx44
Just a quick update ...

No luck as of yet with the recovery effort. Reclaime file recovery software will allow me to save out all of the files, but it does not support deduplication and therefore saves a number of files with empty data. This leads me to believe that the disks are not physically damaged. Is it common for two drives to develop bad sectors at the same time? And since Windows Storage Spaces uses a 2-way mirror (and is able to survive a single drive failure), what are the odds that sectors holding the same data are bad on two drives simultaneously? I"m trying to remain hopeful, because the prices I've been quoted to have a professional fix the problem might as well be a year's worth of mortgage payments. I invested a ton of money into this system to provide redundancy and protect me from loss. Instead, my backup plan created the disaster I had hoped to avoid.


I do want to elaborate on my progress trying to recover the data using other means, in case that information can be of value:

The storage space I want to recover shows up on the R-Studio interface and when I scan, it finds a large number of files. However, it looks like it those files are split among several slabs or partitions, which are named similarly to Recognized1, Recognized2. If I click on the storage space and open the file list, is it showing me the collective files from all recognized partitions under the storage space, or is it only displaying a single partition at a time?

Also, it would appear that the system volume information folder is mostly intact (if not fully intact). I believe the deduplication index is stored here under the Dedup folder. If this is the case, does R-Studio automatically detect if deduplication is being used? Will it then know how to expand the files back to their original state? The data appears to be in good shape on the drive, with the exception that the file database or file table is corrupt. If I could get some guidance on how R-Studio works, I may be able to figure the rest out on my own.


Data-Medics - since my luck hasn't been all that great, I plan to invest into a couple large drives so I can make those disk images. Once the images are created, would I just mount them in Windows and resume recovery attempts much like I've been doing?

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2017 7:32 am
by Alt
Please, post a screenshot with partitions on the WSS.

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2017 3:30 pm
by Data-Medics
kingofheartsx44 wrote:because the prices I've been quoted to have a professional fix the problem might as well be a year's worth of mortgage payments
You must be getting quotes from some expensive places. Our normal rate for a 6 drive RAID is around $2,100, and we usually discount it down if it's any sort of mirroring going on such as a RAID 10 and we can exclude any drives from being necessary.

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 7:37 am
by kingofheartsx44
Here is a screenshot of the scan results ...

Re: Windows 10 Storage Space Recovery

Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 1:18 pm
by Alt
When you open a Recognized partition, R-Studio shows files from that partition only. Looking at the screenshot, I guess that you should pay attention to GPTPart1, Recognized42, and Recognized43.