Win 7 ultimate 64bit : windows explorer issue

[Airbander]

Hello


Here is my issue: My Home server has 10 hard drives all internal but added with internal sata card to support that many drives and i am max out now. I put windows 7 ultimate 64bit and everything working fine but now a new started where When I go to computer or my computer All drives won’t show up no matter what I do
If I \\ back slash from my laptop I am able to see the drives and transfer the file if i restart my pc then I Am able to see my drive under computerbut for short time Not sure what causing windows file explorer go crazy like this.


I Also notice when I go to control panel I get same issue so i tried to create a new user with admin rights and no luck and I tried to rename or delete default administrator account no luck and not able to login to it



I am thinking to OS reinstall this server pc but it is alot of work as i will have to find a graphic card and open the box and so on to do an os reinstall with usb dvd player or usb bootable windows 7 64 bit os





Pls advise
Thanks

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
Have you thought about SPANNING disk volumes -- what this does is that Windows THINKS that a number of disks are actually ONE physical disk. By doing this Windows will then display a much smaller number of disks which will probably be fine.

You could pool them say ONE for OS / essential data. then in 3 groups of 3 -- so windows would see VOLUME C,D,E and F. !!! Windows takes care of placing data on the Spanned volume set -- you don't have to worry about the PHYSICAL LOCATION of the data at all.

I find this very useful since I have some large multi media files which I stream and most streaming software gets into trouble if you want to have say a directory that won't fit on to the available space on one volume. With spanned disks the directory can be up to the size of the entire spanned volume set.

The only downside is that say you have 3 volumes spanned as "Volume D" for example then if one disk fails you lose ALL the data in the spanned volume "D" so you need to take backups - however these days I've found HDD's quite reliable -- I've probably only had ONE failure in over 20 years -- talking about Internal HDD's --laptops and portable HDD's are another issue though.

So what you need to do -- Back up the data on say volumes 1,2,3 . Now convert those to DYNAMIC DISKS - and then you can SPAN them.

Now restore your data --you'll see in Windows explorer one disk with a large capacity say Volume D which is the aggregate of the space on the 3 volumes you spanned.

After you've done this organise your backup strategy to backup directories not volumes for the Spanned disks -- should be fairly straight forward -- I imagine since you are using a server you must already have some sort of backup strategy in place.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[AddRAM]

Are you certain the drives are not powering down ?

Hard drives will do that.

 

[Airbander]

Hello jimbo45
SPANNING disk volumes is great i idea i thought of it but never done it so it is something to look into after i fix this issue i have in hand right now i am not able to fix this issue also all my drives have over 19 TB data so i dont want to lose my data

 

[Airbander]

Hello AddRam

No all my drives are fine and i am able to watch my tv show and movies as i am typing this
i use Media Browser 2 and Media browser 3 with Windows media center so i am able to go to the drive

as i said if i \\ to my server by name or ip i am able to see all the drive

also one more thing i notice when i go to my library MY DOCUMENTS the folder show up but icon images are missing so something went wrong