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On Windows Server 2019, I have an 8 drive Storage Spaces pool that contains many volumes, only one of which is ReFS formatted. (The rest are NTFS.)

My server recently spontaneously started blue screen looping in the middle of some very heavy FS usage (lots of large file deletions). It now blue screens immediately during boot-up and alternates between various REFS.SYS errors. This occurs even with various startup options enabled such as Safe Mode. At the same time, one of the SSDs that makes up my system volume mirror failed. I assumed this meant something had become corrupt on the system volume. This seems to not be the case though, based on the next discovery.

Using a new system disk, I reinstalled Windows Server. It detected the storage pool with all volumes offline. I then brought each volume online one by one. All of the volumes containing NTFS formatted partitions came online without issue. The one ReFS-containing volume, however, causes the new system to blue screen if brought online.

What steps can I take to recover the ReFS partition / run some sort of validation or repair on it? And, is there a way to get the volume to start offline on the original system? (I'd like to move back to the original server image now that I know that it wasn't the system itself that was corrupt.)

David Pfeffer
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    P.S. If I can get ReFS to work for me for a short while, I plan on making a new volume with NTFS and copying the data over. – David Pfeffer May 01 '19 at 11:25

1 Answers1

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Re-format your "orphan" volume as NTFS, recover your data from backup and ditch ReFS from production for another couple of years. When ReFS volumes get filled up to 60-80% they tend to lock up. If you have ReFS user data hashing enabled situation turns even worse.

BaronSamedi1958
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