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I use software RAID on my Windows 7 ultimate box media center. Unfortunately, Windows decides it needs to rebuild my software RAID pair much more often than I'd like. The most common way to see the progress of rebuilding the RAID is to use diskmgmt.msc. However, this is very slow to start up and requires me to either be on the machine directly or use remote desktop to view the results.

I'd like to use diskpart to check the status of my RAID rebuild as it runs much faster and I can SSH into the machine ( to BitVise SSHD) and check the status -- something that is very helpful when the display is active with a movie or TV show. However, it only says whether or not the RAID is rebuilding, not the progress of the rebuild:

DISKPART> list volume                                                                                                                                                                                     

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info                                                                                                                               
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------                                                                                                                           
  Volume 0     C                NTFS   Mirror      1862 GB  Rebuild    Boot                                                                                                                               
  Volume 1         System Rese  NTFS   Mirror       100 MB  Healthy    System                                                                                                                             
  Volume 2     D                       DVD-ROM         0 B  No Media

This shows that Volume 0 is currently in a rebuild process, so I select it for more information:

DISKPART> select volume 0

Volume 0 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> detail volume                                                                                                                                                                                   

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt                                                                                                                                                     
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---                                                                                                                                                     
  Disk 0    Online         1863 GB      0 B   *                                                                                                                                                           
  Disk 1    Online         1863 GB      0 B   *                                                                                                                                                           

Read-only              : No                                                                                                                                                                               
Hidden                 : No                                                                                                                                                                               
No Default Drive Letter: No                                                                                                                                                                               
Shadow Copy            : No                                                                                                                                                                               
Offline                : No                                                                                                                                                                               
BitLocker Encrypted    : No                                                                                                                                                                               
Installable            : Yes                                                                                                                                                                              

Volume Capacity        : 1862 GB                                                                                                                                                                          
Volume Free Space      :  229 GB

As you can see, this provides more information on the volume, but does not provide any insight into the progress of the rebuild.

Any hints on how to get the progress of the rebuilt from diskpart or other command line tool?

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  • I can't really know for sure as I don't work with Software RAID under Win7, but have you tried the other detail commands under diskpart? Check out technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770877%28WS.10%29.aspx for more details on the diskpart options
    – camster342
    Commented Sep 18, 2011 at 23:04
  • I think it would be better to determine, WHY Win7 always rebuilds your RAID. Check your Harddisks with tools like HD Tune. (hdtune.com)
    – DiableNoir
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 5:59
  • 1
    Hard drives are fine. Win7 rebuilds RAID mirror when system goes down during a write. Had some buggy ram on the machine that would crash it -- frequently while recording shows in Media Center. Ergo, RAID rebuild.
    – Pridkett
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 15:36
  • Yeah...kind of figured that it was power off during write or high resource utilization and delayed write fail.
    – RobotHumans
    Commented Oct 22, 2011 at 0:54

1 Answer 1

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1

More information is available through PowerShell and WMI:

Get-WmiObject –List

Get-WmiObject –List | Select-String -pattern "disk"

Get-WmiObject –List | Select-String -pattern "volume"

Get-WmiObject Win32_Volume

I'm not sure if it has information you're searching for, but it has huge amounts of info compared to commmand line tools and certainly worth digging.

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