How to recover unhealthy Virtual Disk in Storage Spaces

Hello, I’m trying to recover from a Storage Spaces disaster. I believe the problem to be fixable, but there aren’t many people out there that ever came to contact with Storage Spaces.

In short, out of nowhere, Storage Spaces is reporting the Storage Pool to be just fine, and one of the virtual disks (a Space, in their terminology) is mounted just fine as well. Other virtual disk, or Space, is not mounted, reports Unhealthy healthstate and Detached operationalstate. I am unable to get around this, in fact, I can’t even find out where is the Unhealthy state coming from and how is that value determined.

Storage Pool:

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Virtual Disk ( notice the Unhealthy status ):

And the drives themselves:

(can’t include the image as a new user, and can’t include link as a new user either).

FASTPARITY1 is a disk with Bitlocker enabled and automount off. Whenever the PC is started and user wants to access data, they are prompted for Bitlocker password.

FASTPARITY2 is a disk without any encryption. It is formatted with NTFS and is available after logging into Windows.

What have I done that has caused this:

Due to some hardware upgrading today, I have done the following: I have unplugged all physical discs from PC1 (where everything worked and PC1 was properly shut down like always) and connected them to PC2. I knew from before that this works and Storage Spaces on PC2 should pick everything up automatically. I have noticed that virtual disk FASTPARITY2 was immediately recognized by PC2’s Storage Spaces, while the FASTPARITY1 was not. I went into Storage Spaces UI and this popped up:

(can’t include the image as a new user, and can’t include link as a new user either).

But when I scroll down to physical drives section, there is no issue:

(can’t include the image as a new user, and can’t include link as a new user either).

When I try to manually connect the detached virtual disk, I am greeted with strange error:

(can’t include the image as a new user, and can’t include link as a new user either).

I thought to myself: “OK, there’s something wrong here, let’s plug them back to PC1 where it all worked 5 minutes ago.” But situation at PC1 is identical, same errors, same issues. The Storage Space seems fine (reports healthy), but the bitlocker-encrypted virtual disk reports unhealthy status and cannot be accessed.

The data is mostly backed up elsewhere, but some would still be lost if I can’t recover from this. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I’ve also remembered about Level 1 forums and I was hoping to find someone here who is a sysadmin with one of these and can help me out here, or reach out to me in a private message.

I understand Microsoft Storage Spaces is not widely adopted among the data hoarding community, and probably for valid reasons, yet currently this is the situation at hand that I am dealing with.

Hi masiton,

Did you ever have any luck with this? I have this exact same issue with it showing as detached and unhealthy. The only difference is that I don’t have bitlocker enabled on my virtual disk.

I’ve been looking online for any guidance, but haven’t found an anything on this.

For future reference if anyone finds this thread – once SS marks a volume Unhealthy, there’s no recovery from this using any of Microsoft’s tooling. Their MSDN page literally states the data needs to be recovered from a backup in case of Unhealthy state.

Now my biggest problem with this was use of Bitlocker. No tool available during that time was able to recover any data, because the data was encrypted. I ended up losing some data during that time and learned not to use SS with Bitlocker for anything important :slight_smile:

this might help.