Windows 10 May 2020 Update is messing with storage on some PCs

Storage Spaces feature is witnessing some serious bugs for certain configurations

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Windows 10May 2020 Update is causing problems for some PCs which are using Storage Spaces, and in terms of being safer rather than sorry, you should avoid installing the latest update if you use this feature (although it may well be blocked from your device anyway).

AsMicrosoftexplains in a supportdocument, some configurations of Storage Spaces are proving problematic after upgrading to theMay 2020 Update(also known as Windows 10 version 2004).

If you’re not aware of the feature, it allows you to pool multiple drives together, and the total capacity from that pool can be used to create virtual drives called Storage Spaces. These Storage Spaces can then be utilized to keep duplicate copies of your data, just in case of drive failure (so you can think of it as a kind of software-based alternative to RAID).

The bug caused by the May 2020 Update means that the partitions for Storage Spaces may errantly show up as ‘RAW’ (as the file system, rather than ‘NTFS’ or ‘ReFS’) under Disk Manager.

If this happens to you, Microsoft makes a point of stressing that you should not run the ‘chkdsk’ (check disk) command – presumably bad things will happen if you do – and that there is no current workaround for this bug.

Read-only safety measure

The best thing to do as advised by Microsoft is to keep your data safe by marking the Storage Spaces as read-only, while waiting for the software giant to come up with a solution. Microsoft says it’s currently in the process of investigating this problem, and will report back when it knows more.

To mark your Storage Spaces as read-only, carry out the following steps. Click on the Start button and type the following:

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Now right click (or long press) on ‘Windows PowerShell’ which pops up in the right-hand panel and select ‘Run as administrator’ (if a User Access Control dialog box pops up, click ‘Yes’).

In the PowerShell window that appears, type the following and press Enter:

This sets Storage Spaces to be read-only, so obviously you won’t be able to write new data to them (but drives not presenting themselves as ‘RAW’ should remain readable, Microsoft notes).

The May 2020 Update has a fair number of known issues now, but fortunately we’ve got atroubleshooting guide explaining how to fix the most common problemsto help you out.

ViaWindows Latest

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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