WHS drive balancer issue

[toony]

Hey guys I have an issue hopefully someone knows what's going on. The other night I tried copying files to my WHS share and I had run out of space, so I added a 1.5tb drive to the pool.
WHS did not show the whole drive olny 750gig worth. I tried running drive balancer to smooth the system out but it won't run keeps on saying it's out of space. Whs also says only one drive has free space so it can't backup. I tried tuning drive balancer a few times, clearing the landing zone, eraseing the fake files etc.... But it would not run. I figur. I have to add another drive to the pool to give the system ability to work.

Last night. Whs warned me there is only 70gig free! I only can figure that whs tried doing it's own balancing and ate up 630gig doing so and then stoped.
Am I correct? Do I just need to add a second empty drive?

Cheers

[Beefcake550]

I think the main problem is that the 1.5TB drive didn't show as such. Who knows what kind of information is being sent to drive balancer.

I am the author of drive balancer, so perhaps you could send along the options you chose and the feedback it gave precisely. Also, could you take a snapshot of the information given in "Disk Management"? I could help then...

-Brian

[toony]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

I think the main problem is that the 1.5TB drive didn't show as such. Who knows what kind of information is being sent to drive balancer.

I am the author of drive balancer, so perhaps you could send along the options you chose and the feedback it gave precisely. Also, could you take a snapshot of the information given in "Disk Management"? I could help then...

-Brian

Hi Brian, I have attached a print screen of the drive balancer. I just tried running it and you can see the errors.

A brief run through of what happened was;
- WHS was down to about 0 free space so I added a 1.5tb drive
- forgot to do the cluster change
- whs accepted the drive but did not seem to show more than 70gig free
- i tried running DB and did clear the landing zone
- DB eventually stopped making any changes, it kept waiting for 1 minute and the percentages stayed the same, for about 3 hours
- I stopped and cleared the fake files
- ran it again this time without clearing LZ and got the message as it is on the picture
- I have restarted a few times
- Tried running Arconis Disk Manager to switch to 64 clusters but I am getting an error on that now so it's left at 4k clusters, the rest of the disks are 64

WHS is now showing 860gb free in the pool, just warning me that only one drive in the pool has free space. So I take it the pool needs balancing.

Hope that helps
Cheers
T

[Beefcake550]

Ok, so it dies when it tries to create 1G fake files on the drives that are mostly full. Problem is not even 1GB appears to be free on one of the drives. Definitely something I should fix. I'm wondering if you indeed cleaned up all the fake files. Just make sure you cleaned them up in 5 places.
1) c:\fs\K\fake
2) c:\fs\M\fake
3) c:\fs\O\fake
4) c:\fs\S\fake
5) d:\fake

While waiting for me to look into this, I'd suggest the following......using Disk Management to find out which drive has no free space. Then, try to remove that disk from the pool. After it's been running for a minute or two, cancel the removal. I think that's possible, but you may want to look into the cancelling. I know I've done it in the past, but I'm not sure how.

One other thing that leads me to think all fake files aren't gone is because Drive balancer (built in WHS tool) is supposed to leave 10GB free on all disks unless there is no free space anywhere. When you added the drive, if any disks had less than 10GB free, it should have moved that data over to the new drive.

Anyhow, I'll look into my source code for a fix for you and you look into the deleting the fake files.

-Brian

[toony]

I did check on the fake files, I did delete all of them.

I added another drive to the pool, and perhaps this will help things out.

Cheers.

[Beefcake550]

OK, let me know how it goes. I had a softball game tonight and another one tomorrow night followed by band on Thursday night. Ther earliest I can look at it is Friday.

[toony]

An interesting thing happened. I added another 1.5tb to the pool and converted it to 64k, but I still could not convert the previous 1.5tb drive to 64k... so I removed it from the pool and realized that on the drive was about 400gig of fake files!!! They did not show up in the pool so I could not get rid of them. Anyway I added that drive back into the pool and things seem calm now. WHS was going a bit nuts telling me of drive failures and what not.

I could not try to balance last night as I had to copy about 1/2 tb to the pool from an unmanaged drive, so I will try to run it again today.

[Beefcake550]

sounds like you are at least makign some progress.

Let me know how the new run goes. Your system is a little beefier than mine is (for which I do the testing of the code on). I will have time tomorrow night to look at issues should you have any. Post as much info as you can and screenshots work best

[toony]

I ran it again the other night, same errors, screen shot is the same as the one posted above, same errors.
It tried filling up all with fake files and then stopped saying the drive was full. Which I thought was the point lol.

[Beefcake550]

sorry dude...

just a quick question before I look at it tonight....it looks like the tool is failiing when it's tryign to create the initial set of fake files. Could you list the amount a free space on each disk as specified by Disk Management - the other WHS plugin?

Thanks.

[toony]

No problem,
This is what's in my pool;

Disk 0 capacity 232 gb free space 69%
Disk 1 capacity 931 gb free space 99%
Disk 2 capacity 931 gb free space 98%
Disk 3 capacity 1397 gb free space 99%
Disk 5 capacity 1397 gb free space 26%
Disk 6 capacity 1397 gb free space 0%


Cheers

[Beefcake550]

Ok, i still haven't looked at the code, but I'm going to go and say that the code doesn't do an initial check that at least 1GB is free on a disk BEFORE allocating it. On your Disk 6, there is nothing free and that is throwing the program for a loop.

I promise to look/fix it this weekend. Thanks for your patience as my parents are coming to visit this weekend!

[Beefcake550]

Ok, so I finally installed Visual Studio on my Win7 machine and noticed something....you are running an older version of the program. Grab the latest code over at

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.p...now-available/

[toony]

Cheers I'll check this out tonight and get back to you.

[toony]

Ok I finally got to run it, and I got bad news... after picking the options, it ran for about 1/2 second and said there is no space on the drives, and then it quit.

It didn't fill up the drives, it did make some fake files but not enough to fill everything. So I deleted them and gave up.

I'm sure oyu want to know what the options I chose were..... if I can remember
I chose to put an equal ammount of data on each drive
not to clear the landing zone (though I'm not sure what that is anymore)
gave it 5 sec for checking
then used option 2 for the last question, but to be honest I have no idea what the last 2 questions were all about, I did read the txt, so I was just taking a stab at that point.

Any ideas?

[Beefcake550]

this sucks.

I would like to see you choose "equal percentage of data" on each disk. I think it might have done the calculations for you system and discovered that after taking "total amount of data in pool" and dividing it by number of drives, it figured one of the drives isn't big enough to accomodate that setting.

Do you have equal sized drives? or do you have different sized disks. Do you include D: in the effort?

Give that a shot and let me know.

[toony]

Ok, I ran it like you said and this time it seemed to run through it's cycle as it should however it did not erase the fake files. I did this myself.

In the end the drives were not balanced properly as one was left at 95% full. It seems that instead of balancing it dumped as much as it could onto one drive freeing space on the others. The other drives were not equal but there was much more free space on them.

[Beefcake550]

Not that I have the answer for why your situation isn't working, but here's how I run it and maybe if you aren't running it this way, it will help.

Inlcude d: in the balancing effort
don't clear out "landing zone" - bad verbage, I know.
equal percentage of data on each drive.

go..

not sure what's going on here. sounds like Microsoft's drive balancer thread is not moving data around like it should. Very curious.....

[Beefcake550]

I noticed something on my own machine that was interesting. Try doing "VSSADmin delete shadows /all" from a command prompt. I've noticed these can take up lots of space and definitely change the "Drive Balancer Algorithm" T.M.

[toricred]

I'm having a similar issue, but it's having problems with the D drive so I can't remove it from the pool. When I look at the properties of D drive I've got some really weird data showing the amount of disk space used (i.e., a series of special characters and not numbers). Any suggestions?