Recommended Posts

I just learned the hard way not to trust New File System Technologies, and wanted to share my experience with you all, in hope you can learn from my mistakes.

I received two new drives in the mail yesterday, and after 24 hours of stress testing in a seperate system, I went to put them in my Server case. My server consists of the following:

LSI 9260-8i raid controller

Intel RES2SV240NC sas expander

4x Supermicro 5 in 3 drive cages

4x Samsung HD204UI 2TB drives (RAID 10)

5x Seagate 3TB drives (RAID 5)

The Samsung drives were formatted as ReFS, and were used solely for my virtual machines (Email, nzb downloads, etc). When I went to insert the two new drives, something happened, and the drive lights lit up on all bays occupied. I rebooted the server, and when it came back up, it said the cache was lost but the controller recovered, and it came back up fine, except Hyper-V would not load any VMS. I checked in windows, and drive E (my VMS /ReFS drive) did not have a full/empty bar. I clicked it, and got a message saying that the drive repair was unsuccessful.

So what does this mean? Something happened to the supposedly "Resilient" file system, it couldn't repair the issue, and it basically wiped my drives (well not wiped, but it thinks it's empty, and won't let me access it" see image:

post-26332-0-93795900-1360985609.png

the only fix is to reformat and restore from backup, which in my case is about a month old.

Moral of the story? Don't trust ReFS yet, and keep better backups. My two other Volumes were fine, both of which are NTFS volumes. I have reformated the RAID 10 volume as NTFS instead of ReFS, and will be investing in a battery backup unit for the LSI controller, just in case this happens again.

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/05/11/microsoft-offering-improved-chkdsk-utility-in-windows-8.aspx

?

Also, I find it highly annoying that most (big) backup providers have not even come out with a solution yet.

  On 16/02/2013 at 03:32, Tech Greek said:

http://redmondmag.co...-windows-8.aspx

?

Also, I find it highly annoying that most (big) backup providers have not even come out with a solution yet.

I tried chkdsk, but STUPIDLY enough, it won't run, giving a message "This volume cannot be checked because it cannot be accessed", yet diskpart works fine at selecting it, and even says that the volume is healthy. I posted a shot showing that diskpart thinks the volume is completely empty

  On 16/02/2013 at 03:48, Tech Greek said:

Did you try any software to recover the partition information? I've got almost all of my servers running on 2012 now and haven't had any issues (most are on RAID1 though)

I didnt. Fortunately it was only VMS, and since I had a backup from 20 days ago, I only lost about 80 emails worth of data. I've got a RAID 1 offline box that is only powered on to backup VMS and other critical data, so I'm fairly protected. I also found out the cause of the original issue, one of the pins in a molex connector that powers the SAS expander came out of the connector, thus cutting off power to the SAS exapander and bringing all drives off at the same time.

In your server 2012 instance, are you useing REFS?

  On 16/02/2013 at 04:24, SirEvan said:

I didnt. Fortunately it was only VMS, and since I had a backup from 20 days ago, I only lost about 80 emails worth of data. I've got a RAID 1 offline box that is only powered on to backup VMS and other critical data, so I'm fairly protected. I also found out the cause of the original issue, one of the pins in a molex connector that powers the SAS expander came out of the connector, thus cutting off power to the SAS exapander and bringing all drives off at the same time.

In your server 2012 instance, are you useing REFS?

I've got a mixed environment right now for the most part. The mission critical ones (exchange - sharepoint) I keep on NTFS just because I didn't want to be a test pig with over 500 employees worth of data.

The power will do it in a heart beat, but doesn't the expander have a battery on it as well?

  On 16/02/2013 at 05:01, Tech Greek said:

I've got a mixed environment right now for the most part. The mission critical ones (exchange - sharepoint) I keep on NTFS just because I didn't want to be a test pig with over 500 employees worth of data.

The power will do it in a heart beat, but doesn't the expander have a battery on it as well?

Nah, the expander receives power directly from the motherboard, or in my case, a 4 pin molex cable (which in this case had a pin come loose) no BBU for intels expanders, HP's may have one. I suppose in hindsight it's a good thing it was power to the expander that failed, since if something happened to say, 2 drives in the RAID 5 array, or 2 in one of the RAID 10 arrays parts, since then I'd probably have lost EVERYTHING.

The entire box has a 1 hour UPS on it, and until I get a BBU for the card, I've disabled write-back on all VD's, as an added precaution.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-defender-update-for-windows-operating-system-installation-images-1c89630b-61ff-00a1-04e2-2d1f3865450d
    • It's a Developer Beta 1 not even a Public or User Beta, I doubt any of the design is 100% finalized yet.
    • Was going to comment the same thing. It's SO annoying to have to go back to settings every time I install something new or some apps like discord update and the icon is hidden again.
    • XRECODE3 1.167 by Razvan Serea xrecode3 is a converter and audio-grabber which allows you to convert from mp3, mp2, wma, aiff, amr, ogg, flac, ape, cue, ac3, wv, mpc, mid, cue ,tta, tak, wav, wav(rf64), dts, m4a, m4b, mp4, ra, rm, aac, avi, mpg, vob, mkv, mka, flv, swf, mov, ofr, wmv, divx, m4v, spx, 3gp, 3g2, m2v, m4v, ts, m2ts, adts, shn, tak, xm, mod, s3m, it, mtm, umx, mlp to m4a, alac, ape, flac, mp3, mp4 (using NeroAAC), ogg, raw, wav, wav(rf64), wma, WavPack, mpc, mp2, Speex, ofr, ac3, aiff, tak, snd and Shorten formats. Command Line parameters are supported. XRECODE3 features: Works on XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, 10 32/64 bit versions and under Wine. Parallel conversion by utilizing power of multi-core CPUs. Support of embedded CUE sheets (for FLAC, WavPack, APE and TAK files). Support of mp4, mka chapters (can split mp4, mka by chapters to any supported format). Built-in Metadata editor with Cover Art support. Has support for LossyWav. Supports portable mode. Merge input files to one large audio file and create CUE sheet. Converting to many formats at once using "Multiple" output mode. Grabbing of multi-channel Audio CDs to the desired format at once. Informative and resizable UI suited even for netbooks. Extracting audio from flv, avi, mov etc. video files (multiple audio streams are supported). Can export/import Metadata to/from external file. Support for 24/32bit audio files. Multilanguage support. Currently program is available in Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Spanish Traditional, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Finnish, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish and Chinese (simplified) languages. What's new in XRECODE3: Native 64bit support. Added support for DSD/DST and DFF formats (including handling of SACD ISOs). Added option to extract audio without transcoding. Added option to encode several files to one multi-channel file. Added option to split file into individual track-per-channel for all available output formats. Added option to merge files per folder. Output and Metadata settings are now output format specific. Enhanced Metadata settings. Added support for multiple Cover pictures in Metadata editor. Added 32bit int/float output for formats which support them (e.g. WAV). Added dithering option in Output Settings. Added option to use EBUR128 in Normalize. Added option to Album Mode Normalize. Added option to configure Matrices under Output Settings. Added more output file pattern elements. Tabbed UI. CUE files are now displayed more nicely. Enhanced Shell Extension. XRECODE3 1.167 changelog: Added option to handle YEAR and DATE tags (under Settings/Metadata/Advanced). Updated to the latest qaac (2.85). Download: XRECODE3 v1.167 (64-bit) | Portable | ~30.0 MB (Shareware) Download: XRECODE3 v1.167 (32-bit) | Portable Link: XRECODE3 Homepage | XRECODE3 Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Hasleo Disk Clone 5.2.2.1 by Razvan Serea Hasleo Disk Clone is a free and all-in-one disk cloning software for Windows 11/10/8/7/Vista and Windows Server that can help you migrate Windows OS to another disk, clone one disk to another disk or clone one partition to another location quickly and efficiently. Completely Free Windows Migration and Disk/Partition Cloning Software Migrate Windows from one disk to another without reinstalling Windows, apps. Clone one disk to another and makes the data on 2 disks are exactly the same. Clone a partition to another location without losing any data. Easily adjust the size and location of the destination partition. Convert MBR to GPT or convert GPT to MBR by cloning. Creation of Windows PE emergency disk. Extremely fast cloning speed and multi-language support. Supported OS: Windows Vista/Server 2008 or later, fully compatible with GPT and UEFI. Note: Hasleo Disk Clone 5.2.2.1 changelog is not yet available. Download: Hasleo Disk Clone 5.2.2.1 | 28.8 MB (Freeware) Link: Hasleo Disk Clone Home Page | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
  • Recent Achievements

    • First Post
      Johnny Mrkvička earned a badge
      First Post
    • Week One Done
      viraltui earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      serfegyed earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Dedicated
      firey earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • Dedicated
      fettermanj earned a badge
      Dedicated
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      627
    2. 2
      ATLien_0
      226
    3. 3
      Michael Scrip
      217
    4. 4
      Xenon
      149
    5. 5
      Steven P.
      139
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!