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Question
Saturday, December 6, 2014 3:36 AM | 1 vote
My first experience of Storage Spaces is not going so well as after a reboot my Storage Pool drives now show broken - Unrecognized metadata.
This is a brand new server, clean 2012 R2 with Upgrade Standard install. Windows Update run to bring up to date. Then added two brand new 6TB drives and enabled Bitlocker on both the Boot drive and Storage Spaces drive. All apparently well. Survived several configuration reboots.
Enable Hyper-V and copy a few VMs onto the drive. All well.
Upgrade the server memory to 16GB ECC, doing a clean shutdown with power fully removed before inserting new DIMMs. Clean power on.
On first boot, drives show Unrecognized metadata and volume (data) is of course not present... please help as absolutely nothing odd occurred here and I've effectively just lost my data that was being mirrored for redundancy!
All replies (16)
Monday, December 8, 2014 1:52 PM
This is in the event log for StorageSpaces Operational
Physical drive {6038d107-2a97-4500-63d5-78cf6ae68723} failed to read the configuration or returned corrupt data for storage pool {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}. As a result the in-memory configuration may not be the most recent copy of configuration. Return Code: Unknown NTSTATUS Error code: 0xc03d0004
The GUID for the Storage Pool seems strange to me. And when I list the Storage Pools I do not see my VMDrives named Storage Pool:
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-StoragePool
FriendlyName OperationalStat HealthStatus IsPrimordial IsReadOnly
us
Primordial OK Healthy True False
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 2:40 AM | 1 vote
Hi,
First please run the command below to reset the Unhealthy disks to make it healthy.
Get-PhysicalDisk | ? OperationalStatus -eq "Unrecognized Metadata" | Reset-PhysicalDisk
For more detailed information, please see:
Step-by-Step for Mirrored Storage Spaces Resiliency using PowerShell
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2014/04/01/step-by-step-for-mirrored-storage-spaces-resiliency-using-powershell.aspx
If you have replacements, you can try to replace the Unhealthy disks and see if you can fix the pool. You could also refer to the thread below to troubleshoot the issue:
Storage Pool disappears afer reboot with FSRM Error 8197
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/78890904-1b78-4a73-bddf-aaffa0ed5a8c/storage-pool-disappears-afer-reboot-with-fsrm-error-8197-
Best Regards,
Mandy
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Tuesday, December 9, 2014 2:52 AM
I ran the PowerShell command and the drives now show Healthy, but things are still very broken. It is like Windows has entirely forgotten the Storage Pool after simply a reboot:
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk | ? OperationalStatus -eq "Unrecognized
Metadata" | Reset-PhysicalDisk
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk
FriendlyName CanPool OperationalS HealthStatus Usage Size
tatus
PhysicalDisk1 True OK Healthy Auto-Select 5.46 TB
PhysicalDisk0 False OK Healthy Auto-Select 931.51 GB
PhysicalDisk2 True OK Healthy Auto-Select 5.46 TB
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-VirtualDisk
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-StoragePool
FriendlyName OperationalStat HealthStatus IsPrimordial IsReadOnly
us
Primordial OK Healthy True False
PS C:\Windows\system32>
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 3:02 AM | 1 vote
Having just read the help for the command you recommended, are you sure that was the wisest advise for a customer?
Detailed Description
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.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 8:37 AM
Hi,
Sorry for my not explaining clearly. Since you cannot see the Storage Pool, it could be due to the physical disks in the Storage Pool have become corrupt. So I suggest you try resetting the drive to add it back to the appropriate storage pool.
Best Regards,
Mandy
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 2:33 PM
But Mandy... where has the Storage Pool gone?
And how do two brand new drives "go corrupt"?
They have a bunch of data on them. Mirrored data.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 2:45 PM
Update - I have a completely reproducible issue here which appears to be a disastrous bug in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Because I still had a copy of the data, I created a NEW Storage Pool as the previous one had vanished. I then added the drives into a mirrored volume. I then enabled Bitlocker on the volume, copied some data to it and shutdown the server.
On a power on the Storage Pool has gone again!!!!!!
This sounds like a super critical bug as it results in customer DATA LOSS, and as for a recommendation that blows away customer data as a 'fix', that is the worst advise ever.
Edit: I tried the cycle again, without enabling Bitlocker. Still looses the storage pool after a reboot so the issue is not Bitlocker on a Storage Spaces setup.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 8:35 PM
ok. So I've been around the loop testing different things.
It appears the data still exists, but the volume is not being discovered automatically after a reboot.
If I right click on Volumes and "Rescan Storage", a volume is detected and reappears. So on boot it fails to detect the volume.
HOWEVER, it needs to automatically mount a volume on boot, else any services that rely on the drive (E.g. Hyper-V) will fail at boot time.
**Note to future readers of this thread, DO NOT use the completely dangerous advise given by Microsoft Mandy here to run a Reset-PhysicalDisk command. **
**You will LOOSE ALL DATA. **
Thursday, December 24, 2015 10:15 AM
I had a major metadata failure in my storage pool with 3 disks, as well. All spaces were lost immediately.
Do NOT follow the advice of Microsoft/Mandy or the recommended action in storage space administration to reset any of the disks, or you will lose all your data.
After 3 days I found a 30$ solution to recvover the data: Download** ReclaiMe Storage Space Recovery** Evaluation version (free demo). This tool was able to detect all my storage spaces in the broken storage pool. Then select file recovery to start the ReclaiMe File Recovery Tool. There you can save the partition as vhd file. There is an option in the main application to export as vhdx file, as well but the resulting vhdx file was completely broken and unreadable by any application.
To store the vhd file, you will need as much space as the maximum size of your storage space, which could be a lot for many configurations.
The resulting vhd was broken as well (damaged partition), but I was able to recover all data with a 30$ tool called Restorer Ultimate. Just mount the vhd file and let the tool do a file recovery on the virtual drive. I suspect that any file recovery tool which is able to handle vhd drives should be capable to recover the files entirely.
For me it is a shame that MS is not providing any tools to recover lost metadata of a storage pool, especially since storage pools are used in professional environment. Furthermore storage pools should keep their metadata on all physical disks and protect the data with history and redundancy. I will never use storage pools again!
Tuesday, August 23, 2016 10:19 PM
This just made me loose 4TB of data.. This advice should be removed!!
Tuesday, September 13, 2016 10:21 PM
Has any one found a solution to this issue?
my OS disk crashed so i replaced that disk and reinstalled the OS, but once in the os the storage pool is gone and the disks just say "Unrecognized Metadata".
There must be some way to recover the storage pool?
if not its completely useless?
Please tell me i didn't just loose 8TB of data just cause the OS disk broke?
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Tuesday, March 14, 2017 2:25 AM
Hopefully Mandy was fired.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017 2:27 PM
FYI, as of 2017-10-11, Reclaime Storage Spaces Recovery program is now $299.95.
Thursday, February 8, 2018 5:34 AM
I was actually trying to down vote this positively destructive and bad advice
Thursday, February 8, 2018 5:35 AM
TERRIBLE and destructive advice!
Thursday, February 8, 2018 5:37 AM
This just made me loose 4TB of data.. This advice should be removed!!
Mandy is hopefully long gone from Microsoft...