David Pfeffer's questions

On Windows Server 2019, I have an 8 drive Storage Spaces pool that contains many volumes, only one of which is ReFS formatted. (The rest are NTFS.)

My server recently spontaneously started blue screen looping in the middle of some very heavy FS usage (lots of large file deletions). It now blue screens immediately during boot-up and alternates between various REFS.SYS errors. This occurs even with various startup options enabled such as Safe Mode. At the same time, one of the SSDs that makes up my system volume mirror failed. I assumed this meant something had become corrupt on the system volume. This seems to not be the case though, based on the next discovery.

Using a new system disk, I reinstalled Windows Server. It detected the storage pool with all volumes offline. I then brought each volume online one by one. All of the volumes containing NTFS formatted partitions came online without issue. The one ReFS-containing volume, however, causes the new system to blue screen if brought online.

What steps can I take to recover the ReFS partition / run some sort of validation or repair on it? And, is there a way to get the volume to start offline on the original system? (I'd like to move back to the original server image now that I know that it wasn't the system itself that was corrupt.)

I'm building a server with a RAID5 array, based on a hardware controller. I want to be able to later add additional disks and have the array rebalance across all of the disks, enlarging the usable size. I also want to be able to later upgrade to bigger disks (one at a time, of course) and then expand the array to fill the entire drive.

These features are available in Linux software raid (md). I've also heard they're available in some hardware controllers. Currently, I own the Adaptec RAID 3805 card and the 3ware 9650se card. I'd prefer to use the Adaptec if possible, but I can't find if either of these cards offer this feature.

If they don't, are there other affordable (read as: sub-$600) RAID cards available that can accomplish this?

I'm in charge of managing an array of Windows Embedded 7 Standard based PCs (they act just like plain old Windows 7).

The computers have 3G cards as their only means of communication, and are on buses. Right now, the 3G cards are configured in NDIS mode which in theory will maintain the connection automatically and persistently. However, sometimes the 3G link fails and never comes back up.

Can someone help me out here? My basic requirements are

• Internet is available always
• If the connection fails, it is detected and retried

Is RAS/DUN more reliable for this sort of thing than NDIS?