Typical Storage Spaces warnings and error messages
When working with Storage Spaces you can get the following warnings and error messages.
These errors may relate to the pool itself, to the virtual disks on it (called spaces),
to the physical drives from the pool, or to any combination thereof.
Storage pool errors
"Drive or storage space issues; check the Physical drives and Storage spaces sections"
Such a problem can occur when you disconnect the drive(s) from the pool and then bring them back.
In this case the error message may appear both in the Storage pool section and in the Storage spaces section
("Inaccessible; check the Physical drives section").
Interestingly, in the Physical drives section all the drives may be displayed as "Okay",
so it may be impossible to identify the drive which is out of order.
"Drive issues; check the Physical Drives section for Warnings or Errors"
This error message appears when the drive dropped off the pool - completely failed or had a transient connection problem.
Generally, reconnection of the drives should solve the problem.
If it is not just flaky connection, but the drive has indeed failed,
you will lose any Simple spaces which had contents on the failed drive.
Storage space errors
"Inaccessible; reconnect drives"
This is a typical error in Storage Spaces.
It is caused by various reasons and mostly happens when pool configuration changes, when you add new drives to the pool or reconnect the drives already in the pool.
"Inaccessible; check the Physical drives section"
If the Storage Spaces control panel lists the faulty drive, try to bring the drive back to the pool.
"Reduced resiliency; check the Physical drives section"
You get the warning when one or more drives belonging to the redundant spaces (mirror or parity) failed.
Usually, such an issue can be easily solved by adding the required number of drives.
"No capacity; add N drives"
You get the error only on Storage spaces with thin provisioning when available disk space ran out.
Just add the required number of drives and the problem will be solved.
Physical drives errors
The warnings and error messages in this section are often accompanied by the errors in the Storage pool and/or
Storage spaces sections.
"Disconnected; reconnect drive"
"Stale; enable pool"
Drives with an unrecognized configuration
Sometimes you can see the message saying that there is a drive or multiple drives with an unrecognized configuration in the pool.
"The following drives contain an unrecognized configuration and can't be used with Storage Spaces.
Reset the drives to make them usable. If the drives continue to be unrecognized, you might need to replace them."
Below the message the problem drives are displayed with the error message "Unrecognized configuration; reset drive".
If you see these error messages, most likely Storage Spaces metadata is damaged and the only option you have is trying
to recover Storage spaces using ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery.
If you plan to recover data, do not reset the drive.
Resetting the drives significantly complicates subsequent recovery attempts.
Action center alerts
If Windows detects that there are some problems with Storage Spaces, Action center will inform you about them.
In the "Maintenance" section you can see the following messages:
- Check Storage Spaces for issues - "There are one or more issues with your storage.
Open Storage Spaces to address these issues."
- Check Storage Spaces for problems (Important) - "There are one or more problems with your storage.
You might need to add or replace one or more drives. Open Storage Spaces to see which drives have problems."
Troubleshooting
There is not much troubleshooting you can do.
If some drives are reported as missing or somehow faulty, check the connections.
Try disconnecting the drives and connecting them back.
In some cases this corrects the problem.
If reconnection fails to correct the problem, most likely you need a full-scale Storage Spaces recovery.
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