Hi,
I am running Windows Server 2012 R2.
I had a 6 x 3TB Storage Space (Party, Thin) which had one of the drives beginning to throw bad sectors. Everything was showing healthy, but I could see a pending failure and I wanted to be proactive.
I conducted the following steps:
- Identified the drive that was failing
- Renamed the failing drive to 'ToRemove'
- Added a new 3TB drive to the storage space
- Marked the failing drive "retired" through powershell
- Repaired the virtual disk (this ran for about 9hrs and moved all but 512MB off of the failing drive)
- Attempted to remove the retired drive through both the Server Manger GUI and Powershell
Issue I am facing:
- The retired drive is still showing 512MB in used space, which I am guessing may be stored on failing sectors and may not be movable
- The virtual disk is still showing "warning: degraded" (which I'm guessing has to do with the 512MB on the retired disk, or the fact that the storage space has a retired drive as a member)
When I try and remove the drive, I'm given two warning screens:
- Warning 1: Windows will attempt to rebuild any virtual disks that store data on this physical disk. For this to succeed, the storage pool must have a sufficient number of physical disks that have enough free space to store the data currently on this physical disk. The ability to to tolerate a physical disk failure will be reduced until the virtual disks are successfully rebuilt. Do you want to remove this physical disk from the pool?
[CLICK YES]
- Warning 2: This storage pool contains one or more virual disks that are not in a healthy state. Remvoing this physical disk now can cause data loss. To remove this phyiscal disk, first repair the following virtual disks: Storage space
[CLICK OK]
Where I'm stuck:
- Trying to repair the virtual disk through either GUI or Powershell takes about 30seconds and completes with no messages. The virtual disk continues to show as degraded. (as a reminder, my first repair run lasted 9 hours and moved most of the data off the failing drive)
- I cannot repair the virtual disk, and I cannot remove the retired failing disk
I have spent 2 days reading every forum post and how-to guide I can find... but I'm at a loss for how to proceed now.
Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated,
Gavin