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Spc .'s avatar
Spc .
Brass Contributor
Nov 30, 2018

ReFS volume auto updated

Hi everyone. Today i was testing out new Windows Server 2019, i did a clean fresh install on a clean drive. After i installed all devices and programs i wanted to test, i powered down my test server...
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Windows Server
gaglenn's avatar
gaglenn
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Dec 12, 2018

ReFS is not intended to be used as a portable format between devices.  ReFS version 3.x will automatically promote to the latest format revision supported by the device it is attached.  The format revisions are not backward compatible, only forward compatible. So, once a ReFS volume is mounted on a device that supports a later ReFS revision, it will be automatically promoted, and that promotion will render that volume unrecognized on devices that support earlier ReFS revisions.  There is no procedure to downgrade the revision, as significant on-disk file system structures have been modified.

fggIB's avatar
fggIB
Iron Contributor
Sep 21, 2020

gaglenn 

 

What about an option to prevent the auto update to the new version with a prompt asking to proceed to auto update or just keep the volume offline instead ?

That would be useful when testing different version of Windows that have different versions of ReFS. 

(Typical case of a Dual Boot machine.)

With the auto update the volume becomes useless for the older version of Windows.

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