Installation & Configuration

Re: Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

jeffrey.scottish — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:06:52 GMT

You're right, Liptonic. As it turns out, WHS doesn't currently support iSCSI, so that's why it doesn't recognize my Drobo. :( What a crock. Looks like I'm reverting back to plain jane Windows Server...or maybe Firewire...this is really disconcerting.

Btw, the initator package worked like a charm for me. Didn't have any problems. But maybe that's b/c the Drobo shielded those complexities from me...?

@Sam - You're right about the DE mounting bit, however, it's perfectly fine for a volume to have multiple mount points (drive letter mount vs folder mount), but it may be a little confusing.

Re: Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

Sam Wood — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:18:28 GMT

Once you restore the registry keys, you might be able to use this tool I wrote to figure out which mount point belongs to which disk:

forum.wegotserved.com/index.php

Re: Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

Sam Wood — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:16:31 GMT

Hi Jeffrey,

Looks to me like you assigned drive letters to the two Drobo volumes at some point. That's a big no-no for Windows Home Server; DE mounts those disks in c:\FS, and assigning a drive letter breaks that mount point.

You'll need to restore those registry keys you removed, and then restore the mount points you deleted. Have a look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Volumes\ - thsoe are the mount points you'll need to restore.

I don't know if you'll be able to figure out which disk corresponds to which volume, though. That's going to be a guessing game I think!

Re: Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

Liptonic — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:18:05 GMT

I have tried iSCSI a couple of months ago and experimented with the MySAN software. What a nightmare that was. At the end I opted to simplify things because was too messy to install the “initiator” package which was not user friendly.

I don’t think the WHS supports UNC or iSCSI with the drive extender correctly. You have to use USB or firewire or even better internal drives.

Re: Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

jeffrey.scottish — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:14:43 GMT

Here's what I've done so far (if you have a weak stomach, you might want to stop reading...)

I've dug through the registry and found where WHS was referencing the two Drobo drives. Yep, you guessed it, I deleted those reg keys (yes, I backed up the registry beforehand, I'm not entirely stupid :)). Anyway, here are the keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Disks\5ea83678-0000-0000-0000-000000000000]
"FriendlyName"="Unknown disk "
"SystemName"="6d7d9513-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
"Size"="2199023185920"
"ObjectID"=dword:0000000e

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Disks\5ea83678-0000-0000-0000-000000000000\Attributes]
"QRole"=dword:00000002
"External"=dword:00000001
"ManufactureName"="DROBO DroboPro 02621a0039003493"
"InstanceID"="\\\\?\\SBP2#Drobo&DroboPro&LUN0#001a620293340039#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}"
"BusType"="Firewire"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Disks\5ea8367d-0000-0000-0000-000000000000]
"FriendlyName"="Unknown disk "
"SystemName"="6d7d950d-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
"Size"="2199023185920"
"ObjectID"=dword:0000000c

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Disks\5ea8367d-0000-0000-0000-000000000000\Attributes]
"QRole"=dword:00000002
"External"=dword:00000001
"ManufactureName"="DROBO DroboPro 02621a0039003493"
"InstanceID"="\\\\?\\SBP2#UNKNOWN_VENDOR&UNKNOWN_MODEL&LUN1#001a620293340039#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}"
"BusType"="Firewire"

I also removed the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Volumes\...\] keys that correspond the the logical volumes of the two physical drobo disks. Then, I rebooted.

Good news:

The two drives no longer show up as missing in the Storage Manager or in the Disk Management addin. As a matter of fact, they don't show up at all in the WHS console.
The data still exists on the two drives.
The OS' Logical Disk Management service still recognizes them.
I was able to successfully run the WHS database repair wizard, though not sure what good that did.

Bad news:

WHS doesn't acknowledge these drives exist, i.e. I can't re-add them into the storage pool! WHY NOT?

-jk

Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

Dirk — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:50:53 GMT

Can you check your windows event log?

If you added the drives to your storage pool they should have been formated automatically. Did you copy data back onto them? Did you have duplication turned on?

Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

jeffrey.scottish — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:27:28 GMT

They were already part of the storage pool, as you can see from the screenshots. What I fail to understand is that the underlying OS (Windows Server 2003) recognizes the two volumes going from 1394 to iSCSI, but WHS does not. I mean, what difference does it make that I switched the physical transport mechanism. The drives still exist, i.e. same drive letters, some volume ID. The OS doesn't have a problem, so why should WHS? I've even tried reverting back to 1394, but WHS still thinks the drives are gone!

At the very least, I want to be able to remove the drives from the storage pool, so if anyone has any workarounds, unsupported hacks, etc., it would be much appreciated.

TIA

-jk

Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

Dirk — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:29:38 GMT

Have you added these to the WHS storage pool? If you did they should all be part of the D:\ volume and not have their own drive letters.

Going from Firewire to iSCSI Has Confused WHS...AGH!

jeffrey.scottish — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:58:41 GMT

I've just finished configuring iSCSI b/w my WHS PC and DroboPro. They were talking via Firewire. But now I've got a problem. WHS thinks the [Drobo] volumes are missing, but the OS (i.e. explorer) sees the drives just fine. See screenshots below.

I've even tried removing the two drives from the Server Storage (yes, i realize that I'll lose all the data on each drive), but the "Remove a Hard Drive" wizard fails with the following message:

Right now, it's looking like my only option is to format the two volumes entirely and start from scratch, but I'd like to avoid that if possible. Thoughts?

TIA,

-jk