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Recovering Storage Spaces pool after old installation was destroyed; installing Windows onto a different drive

Klari 6 Reputation points
2022-02-28T22:10:05.723+00:00

I need to recover/rebuild a Storage Space WITHOUT DESTROYING the data that's already on the drives. I'm in a new installation of Windows, on a completely different drive (PNY CS900 120GB SATA SSD), after my old C drive (Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB M.2 NVMe SSE) got nuked. A "chkdsk /f" from a Windows PE recovery environment, (or rather, bringing up the command line on the Windows Installation USB) obliterated the file record that held the names of files and directories of all the data on the C drive.

The storage pool does not show up in the Storage Spaces manager GUI on this new installation, but the individual disks DO show that they are parts of a storage pool in the Disk Management GUI. The Storage Spaces partitions and records on the two drives that made up the Storage Pool were not disturbed in any way when the old C drive was destroyed. They are both currently labeled as "Healthy (Storage Spaces Protective Partition)."

There is no ReFS/Storage Spaces driver for Linux, so I can't dump the disk image data from my old C drive into this storage pool from a Linux live CD so that I can run recovery software on the raw image and recover some important files that I neglected to back up. I need to convert the storage pool to a different file system (or simply create/convert to a simple NTFS partition) without destroying the data that's on the pool.

If it's any consolation, the pool was already in a two-way mirror, so the data on both drives that were part of the pool SHOULD be the exact same. Could I wipe+format ONE of the drives and somehow recovery+copy over the data from the mirrored drive to the formatted drive? If not this method, how can I put the old storage pool back together so that I can access the files again in Windows Explorer?

Windows 10
Windows 10
A Microsoft operating system that runs on personal computers and tablets.
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Windows Hardware Performance
Windows Hardware Performance
Windows: A family of Microsoft operating systems that run across personal computers, tablets, laptops, phones, internet of things devices, self-contained mixed reality headsets, large collaboration screens, and other devices.Hardware Performance: Delivering / providing hardware or hardware systems or adjusting / adapting hardware or hardware systems.
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  1. Limitless Technology 44,121 Reputation points
    2022-03-08T08:03:23.28+00:00

    Hello @Klari

    Thank you for your question and reaching out.

    Assuming that you have just re-installed OS on new Disk with same version of Windows.

    If your Storage Pool disks are healthy and not touched then They should be automatically detected as Storage pool disks, as its just a Software RAID like other software RAIDs. Make sure they're all plugged in properly in the same order as it was and with the same OS version as it was running earlier.

    As Storage Spaces stores information of pools and storage spaces on the physical disks that made up of the storage pool. Hence pool and storage spaces are saved when you move an entire storage pool and its physical disks from one computer to another.

    https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11382.storage-spaces-frequently-asked-questions-faq.aspx#What_happens_to_Storage_Spaces_when_moving_physical_disks_between_servers

    Hope this answers your question :)
    Thank you.

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    --If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--

  2. Edmund Biro 0 Reputation points
    2023-08-19T04:58:44.96+00:00

    If you don't see them as mountable; then you need a third-party tool ; and every one I've looked at so far is VERY Expensive.

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