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A few days ago my computer started acting funny with mysterious errors and crashes, it felt like it maybe should have BSOD'ed "to prevent damage to my computer", but didn't. It took half an hour to shut down.
After rebooting, all 3 of my Storage Space drives were missing. The StoragePool is backed by two HGST 4TB drives and provides 1 Mirrored, 1 Stripped, and 1 Simple volume. After some time it rebuilt the Mirrored( and Simple volume and listed the PhysicalDrive as retired, after which it refused to rebuild/scan/fix the stripped volume. With enough coaxing through Powershell I was able to get into a state where it claimed a repair was possible if "More space was available". So I ordered a new 4TB Hard Disk.
While waiting for the new drive to ship I ran tests (using a LiveCD because Windows won't let me touch the drive without throwing errors) on the supposedly bad drive and I can't find a problem. Best I can tell is that it's just badly corrupted. So much so that chkdsk immediately crashes when trying to run from recovery.
The NTFS and Disk event logs are reporting about 15,000 errors per hour. The NTFS log reports A corruption was discovered in the file system structure on volume B:. The exact nature of the corruption is unknown. The file system structures need to be scanned online. But any thing you try to do through windows results in a Fatal device hardware error, or in PowerShell gives a The repair failed or The scan failed.
Today I plugged in the new drive and Windows had no problem reading off and recovering the data. It read almost 1TB no problem from the drive at full speed. Note the SMART stats and the "No Failure" and "No Warning".
Windows still tells me the drive failed and doesn't let me use it. This seems like a bug in Windows. The drive appears to be fine. What do I do here?
Derek Ziemba
Posted 2017-10-19T05:32:33.547
Reputation: 1 072
1Reach out to the hardware vendor and ask them if they'd replace due to the issue? Perhaps there is a manufacturer warranty or perhaps other customers have called into them with this problem and they know the cause but have not publicly disclosed it. Perhaps it's a firmware issue on the drive itself or something but worth a shot I suppose if you have the time to simply try. – Pimp Juice IT – 2017-10-19T06:00:23.780
So after it was ready for removal, I removed it, restarted, then added it back and there has been no issues so far. I don't like that StorageSpaces can just suddenly decide it doesn't like a drive for no reason and requires you to buy an additional drive to get your data back. .I did start the Warranty process but I'm unsure how to proceed since they're likely to send a refurbished drive back. Over a span of 15+ years, 3 for 4 of my warrantied replacement have failed in months. The 4th was DOA. – Derek Ziemba – 2017-10-19T20:34:36.780
1Derek - What type of configuration do you have setup with your RAID or whatever? Do you just have a RAID 1 mirror per "HGST 4TB drives and provides 1 Mirrored, 1 Stripped, and 1 Simple volume". Typically you would want to have one hot spare onsite ready to take over so having the actual extra drive is not necessarily a bad thing I wouldn't personally think. However, the Windows OS hosing up and telling you otherwise the storage pool is missing is a different story. – Pimp Juice IT – 2017-10-19T20:38:45.110
The mirrored is: 1 column, 2 copies. The Stripped is: 2 columns, 1 copy. The Simple is: 1 column, 1 copy. Maybe I'll make that 8yr old 1TB Samsung with 5.97year power on time the hotspare. Because of its age I don't trust it with anything more than downloads/junk. I just don't want StorageSpaces putting anything important on it. – Derek Ziemba – 2017-10-19T20:45:52.587
1Okay, a few things I want to suggest in terms of it just being a bug as you indicate in the post....
1.Be sure to have a good OS image backup2.Ensure all the latest Windows Updates installed3.Ensure the latest BIOS firmware for your make and model PC installed4.Check computer manufacturer website for the latest device driver downloads. – Pimp Juice IT – 2017-10-19T20:55:22.613Here's full (very detailed) specs: https://rawgit.com/DerekZiemba/4008ac6f7bd8792515e74f8383502c4d/raw/9a65d0b47d8be31995c589beea6b57defc0cc847/Derek-WIN10.HTM
– Derek Ziemba – 2017-10-19T21:08:13.707Is this a specific make and model machine or did you custom build? Per at least the MOBO manufacturer there is a beta (
– Pimp Juice IT – 2017-10-19T21:33:19.787P) firmware version but states "we do not recommend users to update their BIOS if the system is functioning properly" (http://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/Z77%20Extreme4/index.nl.asp?cat=Download#BIOS) but check the Download tab too for things there. I don't stay up to date with all the latest workstation PC hardware but if you purchased from a manufacturer different than ASUS, check their website too for device driver downloads.