Problem
You get an error message stating that there is some kind of problem with \Device\Harddisk#\DR#. For instance Event ID 11 from Disk: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk4\DR4.
The disk number referenced in the error message does not necessarily correspond to the disk id numbers in Disk Management. To figure out which disk is referenced, some digging is required.
Solution
There may be several ways to identify the drive. In this post I will show the WinObj-method, as it is the only one that has worked consistently for me.
- First, get a hold of WinObj from http://sysinternals.com
- Run WinObj as admin
- Browse to \Device\Harddisk#. We will use Harddisk4\DR4 as a sample from here on out, but you should of course replace that with the numbers from your error message.
- Look at the SymLink column to identify the entry from the error message.
- Go to the GLOBAL folder and sort by the SymLink column.
- Scroll down to the \Device\Harddisk4\DR4 entries
- You will find several entries, some for the drive and some for the volume or volumes.
- The most interesting one in this example is the drive letter D for Volume 5 (the only volume on this drive).
- Looking in Disk management we can identify the drive, in this case it was an empty SD-card slot. We also see that the Disk number and DR number are both 4, but there is no definitive guarantee that these numbers are equal.
Most likely, the event was caused by an improper removal of the SD card. As this is a server and the SD card slot could be a virtual device connected to the out-of-band IPMI/ILO/DRAC/IMM management chip, the message could also be related to a restart or upgrade of the out-of-band chip. In any case, there is no threat to our important data which are hopefully not located on an SD card.
If you receive this error on a SAN HBA or local RAID controller, check the management software for your device. You may need a firmware upgrade, or you could have a slightly defective drive that is about to go out in flames.