Windows 10 Storage Spaces (Parity Spaces Pool using ReFS)

[cruce]

Dear all,

Over the years I have accumulated 9 drives in my Parity Storage Spaces Pool using ReFS. I moved my drives from an old desktop PC to a server PC and ran into an issue with Windows Storage Spaces not recognizing the pool. To try and keep a very long story short (problem started in April 2019), I have 8 of the 9 drives not recognized anymore and the Pool no longer shows up under Storage Spaces. In hindsight, the problem could have been resolved with simple Molex to Sata Power adapters. Please see this post as a reference, https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to ... el-Disks-/. There is no way to tell, but I will explain later. As a side note, moving the drives back to the old PC did not resolve the problem. Why? I have no idea and decided it was best to move forward. And, no I did not have a proper backup. I didn't have enough money to buy the required number of drives to do a full backup and I should have at least backed up some of the more important files. In my defense, I thought I had a backup of those files, but not all of them. Lesson learned and duly scolded. Even the best of us fall victim to the very words we preach but don't always practice ourselves.

A little back story. I had found a post showing almost the exact same problem that I had and a response from someone else stating that they had the exact same problem and had written up a tutorial on their blog on how to fix the problem. This is where emotions can blind you from thinking logically and thus my nightmare began. I can no longer find this forum post or blog as a reference as it has been several months ago and I can't find it in my browser history. Needless to say, I started following the tutorial until I got to the section that had me run some commands in PowerShell that essentially looped through my drives and issued reset-physicaldisk followed by more commands to repaired-virtualdisk. I was never able to run repaired-virtualdisk and further researching on why I couldn't do repair-virtualdisk, brought me to this understanding from Microsoft's site, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powers ... w=win10-ps:

The Reset-PhysicalDisk cmdlet resets the status of a physical disk. For Storage spaces, this is a destructive operation that removes the Storage pool configuration and pool data from the specified physical disk.


So I was left with 8 out of my 9 drives as showing up as unallocated. My initial searching brought me to ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery and ReclaiMe File Recovery. Remember above when I mentioned the Molex to Sata Power adapters? While I was trying to run Storage Spaces Recovery, the program would crash and I would need to reboot and some of the drives would disappear. Apparently the new power supply on my server PC and my shucked drives sometimes would show up and sometimes they would not. It wasn't until I put in the adapters that all of my hard drives were stable and consistently did not disappear. Too bad I was already head deep into the problem. Storage Spaces was able to scan the drives and find all 9 drives in the pool and created their storage spaces xml file to be used with their File recovery program. The thing I noticed was that even though it claimed to find all 9 drives and the xml file showed all 9 drives, their GUI only showed 2 of the drives listed in the pool. I brought this to their attention and was told to proceed with the file recovery program. After many attempts, many patch releases to fix software bugs and even though they have been very helpful with almost daily correspondences back and forth, they have not been able to fix the software bugs. It finally finished scanning and claimed to have found over 2.5 million files and showed the folder tree. I can tell that some folders are missing and some folders show up under the wrong folders. It is like the recovery program could not recognize where the folders were suppose to be and placed them under different folders. For example. I know for a fact that certain folders "A" should be under user folder "A" but were being listed under user folder "B". And that 1000's of movie and TV episode files were not listed under folder "Videos" but were scattered throughout the different user folders, I'm using Plex. Plus all of the files were flagged as deleted or failed to read.

Thanks for reading through the backstory. I am now attempting to learn more about ToolDisk and see if it will read my unallocated disks and recover my files. I have tried several other programs and currently trying MiniTool. Most seem to be able to recover some of my files, but they all have the names, file_found00x.xxx or something similar. It would be great if there was a way to repair the storage pool, but I am not hopeful of that. It would be great to just recover most of my files with their filenames in tact.

I have read where people were successful in using TestDisk to recover files from a Storage Spaces Pool using ReFS, but they can't remember how they did it as they had learned just enough information to get the job done. Does anyone have any experiences that they can share steps in recovering files? I still find it hard to believe that it can be this difficult to recover from a simple reset-physicaldisk command. From my understanding, all it does is remove the metadata from the small partition on the hard drive that tells the pool where the files are located. The files themselves are untouched. I am currently waiting waiting for Minitool Power Data Recovery to finish scanning one of the 9 drives and their tool can not scan the 9 drives as a whole. However, it does see the small partition that would have contained the meta data and the large parttion that contains the files. But alas, it is scanning them as raw files and I see a mountain of Recovered_xxx_file(xx).xxx files.

I am very grateful in any knowledge anyone can pass down and, as you can tell, I am very patience and willing to work with anyone.

Thanks in advance.
Rick

[ShaneP]

Dear all,

Over the years I have accumulated 9 drives in my Parity Storage Spaces Pool using ReFS. I moved my drives from an old desktop PC to a server PC and ran into an issue with Windows Storage Spaces not recognizing the pool. To try and keep a very long story short (problem started in April 2019), I have 8 of the 9 drives not recognized anymore and the Pool no longer shows up under Storage Spaces. In hindsight, the problem could have been resolved with simple Molex to Sata Power adapters. Please see this post as a reference, gimp freejobalert notepad++. There is no way to tell, but I will explain later. As a side note, moving the drives back to the old PC did not resolve the problem. Why? I have no idea and decided it was best to move forward. And, no I did not have a proper backup. I didn't have enough money to buy the required number of drives to do a full backup and I should have at least backed up some of the more important files. In my defense, I thought I had a backup of those files, but not all of them. Lesson learned and duly scolded. Even the best of us fall victim to the very words we preach but don't always practice ourselves.

A little back story. I had found a post showing almost the exact same problem that I had and a response from someone else stating that they had the exact same problem and had written up a tutorial on their blog on how to fix the problem. This is where emotions can blind you from thinking logically and thus my nightmare began. I can no longer find this forum post or blog as a reference as it has been several months ago and I can't find it in my browser history. Needless to say, I started following the tutorial until I got to the section that had me run some commands in PowerShell that essentially looped through my drives and issued reset-physicaldisk followed by more commands to repaired-virtualdisk. I was never able to run repaired-virtualdisk and further researching on why I couldn't do repair-virtualdisk, brought me to this understanding from Microsoft's site, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powers ... w=win10-ps:

The Reset-PhysicalDisk cmdlet resets the status of a physical disk. For Storage spaces, this is a destructive operation that removes the Storage pool configuration and pool data from the specified physical disk.


So I was left with 8 out of my 9 drives as showing up as unallocated. My initial searching brought me to ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery and ReclaiMe File Recovery. Remember above when I mentioned the Molex to Sata Power adapters? While I was trying to run Storage Spaces Recovery, the program would crash and I would need to reboot and some of the drives would disappear. Apparently the new power supply on my server PC and my shucked drives sometimes would show up and sometimes they would not. It wasn't until I put in the adapters that all of my hard drives were stable and consistently did not disappear. Too bad I was already head deep into the problem. Storage Spaces was able to scan the drives and find all 9 drives in the pool and created their storage spaces xml file to be used with their File recovery program. The thing I noticed was that even though it claimed to find all 9 drives and the xml file showed all 9 drives, their GUI only showed 2 of the drives listed in the pool. I brought this to their attention and was told to proceed with the file recovery program. After many attempts, many patch releases to fix software bugs and even though they have been very helpful with almost daily correspondences back and forth, they have not been able to fix the software bugs. It finally finished scanning and claimed to have found over 2.5 million files and showed the folder tree. I can tell that some folders are missing and some folders show up under the wrong folders. It is like the recovery program could not recognize where the folders were suppose to be and placed them under different folders. For example. I know for a fact that certain folders "A" should be under user folder "A" but were being listed under user folder "B". And that 1000's of movie and TV episode files were not listed under folder "Videos" but were scattered throughout the different user folders, I'm using Plex. Plus all of the files were flagged as deleted or failed to read.

Thanks for reading through the backstory. I am now attempting to learn more about ToolDisk and see if it will read my unallocated disks and recover my files. I have tried several other programs and currently trying MiniTool. Most seem to be able to recover some of my files, but they all have the names, file_found00x.xxx or something similar. It would be great if there was a way to repair the storage pool, but I am not hopeful of that. It would be great to just recover most of my files with their filenames in tact.

I have read where people were successful in using TestDisk to recover files from a Storage Spaces Pool using ReFS, but they can't remember how they did it as they had learned just enough information to get the job done. Does anyone have any experiences that they can share steps in recovering files? I still find it hard to believe that it can be this difficult to recover from a simple reset-physicaldisk command. From my understanding, all it does is remove the metadata from the small partition on the hard drive that tells the pool where the files are located. The files themselves are untouched. I am currently waiting waiting for Minitool Power Data Recovery to finish scanning one of the 9 drives and their tool can not scan the 9 drives as a whole. However, it does see the small partition that would have contained the meta data and the large parttion that contains the files. But alas, it is scanning them as raw files and I see a mountain of Recovered_xxx_file(xx).xxx files.

I am very grateful in any knowledge anyone can pass down and, as you can tell, I am very patience and willing to work with anyone.

Thanks in advance.
Rick

I also need help with the same. Help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shane