Question TowerRAID/Windows Storage Spaces only visible on original computer

droidmark

Commendable
Feb 21, 2019
2
0
1,510
My computer is Windows 10 Pro, i9, 64GB RAM, RTX2080 originally set up with a 2TB Samsung SATA SSD boot drive. I got a TowerRAID TR8UM6G 8-drive external USB/eSATA enclosure and put in 8 2TB drives that I had on hand. I don't have an eSATA card so am connecting the external bay with USB 3.0.

I created two Windows Storage Spaces on the external drives, one with parity and one with triple redundancy. I transferred about 9TB from my Plex server onto the parity drive.

Then I installed a 1TB Intel M.2 NVME boot drive. I cloned my original boot drive to the M.2 using EaseUS ToDo Backup, but after playing around with BIOS settings and failing to get the new drive to boot, I gave up and did a clean install of Win10Pro on the M.2 drive.

However, when I boot from that drive, the external bay and Storage Spaces are invisible. The drive lights blink on the external bay while booting and there clearly is communication between the computer and the drive bay, but the Storage Spaces do not show up as drives and even in Disk Management the individual drives are completely absent. If I go into Storage Spaces, they are again completely invisible-- no way even to start over and create new Storage Spaces.

After freaking out for a while, I switched back to the original 2TB SSD boot drive, and voila, the Storage Spaces reappeared and function normally.

Then I tried connecting the external bay to several other Win10 computers and it is completely invisible on all of them. It is seen only on the original computer with the original SSD boot drive.

Help! Having redundant external storage is pretty useless if I have no way to access it in the event of computer failure. Also I would like to be able to use my new M.2 boot drive!
 

droidmark

Commendable
Feb 21, 2019
2
0
1,510
Holy cow - you nailed it on the first try!

I really didn't think that was the issue, because as soon as I did the installation, I ran Windows Update and installed everything it offered.

But when I dug deeper, I found that the "new" install (AND all the other computers I tried) was at 1803, whereas the "old" boot drive was already at 1809.

I did a manual update of the new M.2 install to 1809, and there are my Storage Spaces. Thanks so much!