The Windows 10 May 2020 Update is causing major hard drive management issues

We reported earlier that Microsoft has been informed of the Fresh Start issue with Windows 10 2004, but that at least this did not result in data loss and was therefore not that serious.

It seems that issue was just a harbinger of more serious issues, as Windows 10 2004 appears to have multiple issues with hard disk drive management, with uses reporting issues even with the RTM version.

The first is the most serious – users are reporting issues with Storage Spaces – Microsoft’s version of Software RAID, which pools a number of physical hard drives into a virtual drive and then mirrors data throughout the volume.

WindowsLatest reports that users are complaining of issues being able to create new Storage spaces, running into the error:

Cannot create new Storage Space. Error (0x00000057): The parameter is incorrect.

It is notable that users have been complaining of the problem in the Feedback Hub for months now, with one user saying 9 months ago:

Hard to explain in detail, but Storage Space management doesn’t work very well via the GUI. I am able to manage storage pools, spaces, physical disks, etc. fine through PowerShell, but the GUI encountered issues at every step. Maybe storage space management should be modernized to follow the Server Manager model where it just issues a PowerShell script that is visible to the end user.

Even worse, some users are reporting that the problems are causing data loss.

“My 20 TB parity storage space shows up now as raw, no accessible files. Storage Spaces tool and Powershell show it as healthy, containing data. Looks like the ReFS partition has been corrupted, and I may have to fork out cash on recovery software and some external drives to copy files to so I can rebuild.”

and another…

“I started noticing corrupt photos I keep on my parity storage space in the last week. No errors in chkdsk though. Luckily I’ve been able to restore the images from backup and the corrupt versions haven’t been synched back to OneDrive,” another user added.

Compared to the Storage Spaces issue the next issue is much more minor.

After upgrading to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, users are reporting that the Optimize Drive tool is not recording the dates of the last manual or automatic scan, meaning despite a recent scan, Windows often complains that your drive has never been optimised and that the tool needs to be run.

One user notes:

Defrag Tool not working correctly, will scan and finalize even shows the date and defrag percentage as it should, that is until you close the application, then it shows Never Ran

Users have been complaining about the issue for at least 6 months now.

As Brett P notes: