Windows 10: the last update of 2004 sows discord in Storage Space

Do you use Microsoft’s Storage Spaces technology to create a storage pool? Avoid installing the 2004 Windows 10 update, which poses major problems with this function. This version of the OS no longer correctly recognizes storage spaces as a volume, and a partition may appear as RAW in Disk Manager and become inaccessible. Worse, there is no real workaround for this problem, Microsoft said in a support document. Storage Spaces is a feature dating back to Windows 8.1.

This nifty storage technology manages multiple internal and external hard drives or SSDs to create a storage pool. It essentially provides RAID (Redundant Array of Disks) protections by mirroring the contents of one disk onto another to enable a backup to be restored in the event of a failure. If Microsoft does not currently offer any corrective to overcome this annoying situation, the publisher has announced a workaround to transform storage spaces into the equivalent of good big old virtual DVD-ROMs for the moment, by granting the user read access to volumes, but no ability to write data.

The chkdsk command to be banned under penalty of malfunction

The workaround, hopefully temporary, offered by Microsoft:

1 / Select Start and type: PowerShell;
2 / Right click or long press Windows PowerShell and select Run (as administrator);
3 / If you are prompted by a User Access Control for Windows PowerShell dialog box, select Yes;
4 / In the PowerShell dialog box, type the following command and press enter: get-virtualdisk | ? WriteCacheSize -gt 0 | get-disk | set-disk -IsReadOnly $ true;
5 / Your storage spaces should now be set to read only, which means that you will not be able to write to them. Your system will still be usable and any volume not considered RAW should be readable.

In parallel, Microsoft also recommends not to execute, under penalty of bug and malfunction, the chkdsk command which checks the integrity of a volume or of a removable media, and makes it possible to repair certain logical errors. The publisher is still working on its list of issues that appeared with Windows 10 Update 2004, fixing bugs that included Windows inability to find Office apps caused by an issue with Avast antivirus software. Windows 10 2004 is still being rolled out, and Microsoft explained on June 16 that it was starting to train a machine-learning-based process to more finely select which devices can accommodate this update.