My music library consists of 6 external hard drives, all of which are WD My Book External Hard Drives. They had worked flawlessly with Roon until I upgraded it to the very first build of v1.3. The two hard drives having problems are Drive [I:] and Drive [J:] respectively.
Right after the upgrade, Drive [I:] disappeared from the list of folders in “Storage” and can no longer be found when I click on “Add Folder”. Meanwhile, Drive [J:] shows the message of DirectoryNotReady every time I reopen Roon, requiring me to remove and add back the hard drive.
I tried to unplug Drive [I:] and plug it back into my PC, but all it did was to take Drive [J:]'s place. The same DirectoryNotReady problem now happens to Drive [I:], and now Drive [J:] is missing from Roon, like Drive [I:] was. When I try to unplug Drive [J:] and plug it back in, I get back to where I started…
This is an oddly specific glitch that has been going on since v1.3. I have been waiting for a patch that might fix this problem but it seems that no one else has reported anything similar yet… Any help regarding this glitch would be much appreciated!
I discovered that both Drive [I:] and Drive [J:] indeed shared the same Volume ID, which is very likely the cause of the problem. However, I am unable to change the Volume ID of any drives at all using VolumeId. I also tried to use the second software suggested by the article, HardDiskSerialNumberChanger, but I still couldn’t change the Volume ID of any drives. Trying both methods in Safe Mode didn’t work either…Maybe Roon shouldn’t use Volume ID to identify hard drives?
Can you describe what happens when you try to change the volume id? Maybe we can figure out another way of changing it that would work.
Alternately, there are some other workarounds that you could try: If you have a place to copy the data on one drive to temporarily, re-formatting one of them should work. Or, sharing one drive (or both drives) over SMB and accessing it as a shared drive from the same machine should work.
I agree that we shouldn’t have used the Volume ID to identify drives, it seemed like a good idea at the time but is causing us a bunch of difficult problems. We plan to move away from it at some point in the future, but there is some complication in that we need to make sure that existing users aren’t broken during the migration.
Using VolumeId to change the volume ids of either Drive [I:] or Drive [J:] returns “Error reading drive: The parameter is incorrect.” I thought it might be a syntax error so I switched to a simpler method like HardDiskSerialNumberChanger. But, no matter which drive’s volume id I try to change, I get the message, “Unable to write to this disk in drive.” I wonder if these two methods are too old for Windows10.
Although I do have enough space to make a copy either Drive [I:] or Drive [J:], both drives contain nearly 4TB of data. It will take over 10 hours to copy either drive’s content, and another 10 to put everything back in. As for SMB, I have no idea how to use it.
Hope you guys can figure out a way to move away from using Volume ID pretty soon.
Hi @Jethro_Tai ----- Thank you for the follow up and my apologies for the wait here. We did some testing yesterday and I would like to ask you to try and setup a network share with the drives, but we are going to share them on the same machine instead of across two.
With the [I:] and [J:] drives still mounted to the PC computer, please perform this procedure for each drive one at a time…
Find the drive to be shared in Explorer.
Right click on the drive and select “share with” then “Advanced sharing”.
Set the correct permissions to share the drive.
Find the correct path for the drive. The easiest way to find the correct path is by going to Windows explorer - > network - > find the name of your current computer -> click and copy from the address bar.
Thank you very much for your help! Have a nice day!!