Removing a dead disk from a Windows Server Storage Pool
Windows storage spaces works well with disk that behaves and are running perfectly fine.
However there will be times where a disk fails and you are not able to remove it easily via the GUI. With individual disks, that is fine, however things gets a bit tricky when you have disks with the same name e.g because it is exposed via a Raid Controller.
The steps below detail how to remove a dead disk from a HP server with all the disks configured in Raid 0. But it works broadly across any setup
In the event a disk dies, you will need to replace the physical disk and recreate the disk array using HP Smart Storage Administrator. Thereafter, upon adding the new disk to the pool, you realize that you are unable to remove the old disk which no longer exists on the server.
Upon clicking Remove Disk, you will get the following error
To remove the disk, we are going need Windows Powershell
- First get all the disk that are exposed by HP RAID controller, make sure the disk that you want to remove is set as Retired under the Usage column
Get-PhysicalDisk | where {$_.Manufacturer -eq “HP”}
2. Next trigger a repair of all virtual disks which have a “Warning” Health Status
Get-VirtualDisk | where {$_.HealthStatus -eq “Warning”} | Repair-VirtualDisk
3. Wait for the repair to finish (note this can take a few hours!)
4. Once the disk repair is completed, we can proceed to remove the disk. run Get-StoragePool and identify which Pool the disk belongs to
5. To remove the retired disk, we can then use the following command. You will be prompted to confirm the action, type “y” and then press Enter to continue
$PDToRemove = Get-PhysicalDisk | where {$_.HealthStatus -eq “Warning”}
Remove-PhysicalDisk -PhysicalDisks $PDToRemove -StoragePoolFriendlyName “HDD”
6. When it is completed, go back to Server Manager and click on Tasks > Rescan Storage
7. The disk should now be removed and all virtual disks in the pink of health
