It appears that I have inadvertently damaged my Storage Space when upgrading from Server 2012 to Server 2012R2 (or maybe it is just a coincidence) and I am looking for help in repairing/recovering my virtual disk.
THE BACKGROUND
1) I built a new Server 2012 system about three months ago (SEP-2013) to use as a file server
2) I created a new Virtual Disk on this system
- PHYSICAL DISKS: I installed 4 x 3TB WD Red NAS drives
- STORAGE POOL: I created a single ~11TB Storage Pool (using all four disks)
- FIXED VOLUME: I created a single ~11TB "fixed" volume from the Storage Pool
- VIRTUAL DISK: I created a single ~8TB virtual disk using PARITY and ReFS (named VHD-1)
3) I copied ~5TB of data to VHD-1
4) Everything has worked fine since then - with daily READ/WRITE activities on the virtual disk
THE PROBLEM
5) I recently built a new Server 2012R2 system
6) I transferred the Storage Pool disks to the new system, expecting them to connect/attach without issue - but I was wrong...
7) When I boot the new system, the Storage Pool appears in the Server Manager > Storage Pools GUI (as expected)
8) The "VHD-1" virtual disk appears on the Storage Pools GUI with a yellow "ALERT"... indicating that the VHD must be attached to the system (as expected)
9) When I right-click on the VHD-1 entry, and select "ATTACH", the system immediately hangs and becomes unresponsive - requiring a manual power-cycle to re-boot the system
10) To be clear, I receive no error messages and the four physical disks all appear to be healthy - so the Storage Pool, the VHD and the physical disks all appear to be OK in the GUI
In summary, I attached a "functional" Server 2012 Storage Pool to a new Server 2012R2 system and it became "non-functional" on the first boot.
ATTEMPTS TO DIAGNOSE/FIX
11) I have run all of the following PowerShell cmdlets and no errors or abnormalities are reported
a) Get-StoragePool
b) Get-VirtualDisk
b) Get-PhysicalDisk
b) Get-Volume
12) The system logs do not indicate any errors associated with the pool, the VHD or the physical disks
13) I have tried to use the "connect-VirtualDisk" PowerShell cmdlet to attach the VHD (instead of using the GUI), but the results are the same... the system immediately hangs and becomes unresponsive
14) I have tried to use the "repair-VirtualDisk" cmdlet and, again, the system hangs with the "% repair complete" remaining at 0% for more than 12 hours
15) I have re-connected the drives to the original Server 2012 system that I used to create the pool (in hopes of regaining access to the data) and it now exhibits the same behavior... it hangs when I attempt to attach the VHD
16) I am aware that Server 2012R2 has a new format for Storage Spaces and it offers to "upgrade the storage pool" to the new format (this can also be accomplished with the "Update-StoragePool" cmdlet, but I have not yet attempted that option
because I am concerned that it might make an already bad situation even worse...
17) I have searched the forums and noticed a few references to similar Parity Storage Spaces failures (system hangs), however, they all seem to be associated with NTFS file systems and I am using ReFS... so my situation seems unique
HELP REQUESTED
I am hoping that Server 2012R2 has a more robust set of "recovery/repair" tools for storage pools than Server 2012, and that someone can point me to a path to safe recovery of my data.