Case II - finding drive identifiers

This case deals with failure of Storage Spaces metadata when maps defining where a particular slab is physically located, are in good condition, but identifiers of physical drives are lost. To recover Storage Spaces configuration it is enough to match physical drives to their corresponding identifiers and then use existing maps.

In this case, once you selected all the pool member disks in ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery software and clicked the Start button, all the needed spaces are listed as Missing drives; try Find drives.

To start searching for matches between physical drives and their identifiers click the Find Drives button. The Find drives procedure works only with those drives that you selected on the first screen before clicking the Start button.

Limitations

The Find drives procedure can be executed only if the pool has at least one fault-tolerant space - mirror (regular or three-way), parity or double parity. In some cases it is required to find all the missing drives, while in other cases part of the drives may be left missing. How many drives can be missing depends on a particular pattern of slab placement in the space.

Performance considerations

Speed of the Find drives procedure depends mainly on the pool configuration and to a lesser extent on CPU power of the PC running Storage Spaces recovery. The more drives to find and the less CPU power, the more recovery time. Typically it takes about several minutes; the worst-case scenario is up to a couple of hours. If the procedure does not complete within three hours, then no more result can be produced for a given set of disks, and you should abort the process.

If during the Find drives procedure the Internet connection to the server is lost, the analysis will stop. All the data accumulated by the time of disconnection will be saved. Once the connection to the server is re-established, you can restart the analysis by clicking Find drives again and it will pick up where it left off.

For faster speed, try not to specify the drives which don't belong to the pool and especially try not to specify the drives from another pool.

If matching fails, nothing can be improved within the limits of Case II and you should try Case III algorithms.

If this didn't work out

If you have already tried the Find drives on a particular set of drives and this didn't help (needed spaces have not changed to Good or Readable) the Find drives button becomes disabled and all you can do next is to try the Deep Scan.