ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery limitations

ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery utilizes different recovery techniques resulting in all recovery cases are divided into three categories - simple recovery (case I), recovery using Find drives (case II), and recovery using Deep scan (case III). Algorithms used in these cases have certain limitations.

General limitations

These limitations are applicable to all cases of Storage Spaces recovery. ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery extracts spaces only from the drives that belong to a pool entirely. Although Windows can use a part of the disk for Storage Spaces and another part of the same disk for regular volumes, ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery doesn't work with such configurations.

One more limitation is that ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery is designed to recover Storage Spaces configuration only from the drive belonging to a single pool. Although Windows can create configurations where a drive belongs to two pools simultaneously, generally, ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery does not recover such configurations - the Deep scan procedure doesn't support them at all, while Find drives and processing Storage Spaces metadata bring random results.

Deep scan limitations

The Deep scan procedure works only with the spaces formatted to NTFS or ReFS. Although Windows allows you to format a space to FAT or exFAT, ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery doesn't support such configurations. Additionally, the Deep scan procedure supports only standard configurations of partition table - MBR and GPT. Theoretically, using Disk Management you can create a RAID of several spaces, but you cannot recover such a configuration using Deep scan.