After using a disk for “Storage Spaces”, if you try using it on another machine, you might not see the disk in “Disk Management”.

Applies to:

Windows Server 2012 R2.

WARNING:  Make sure you have a good working backup before you do anything with “Storage” in general.

A few weekends ago, I bought a new 240 GB Samsung SSD drive that was on-sale to replace one of the 128 GB Samsung SSD in my “Storage Spaces” running in “Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Server”.  Since I didn’t have anything of value in the drives, I simply removed the old drive and put the new drive in and recreated the “Storage Spaces” from scratch following the tips in:

Storage Spaces Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

On the new Server hardware, I tried re-using the 128 GB SSD as it’s O.S. drive.

Every time that I tried going to the Windows setup, I would get the generic error:

/*

We couldn’t find any drives.  To get a storage driver, click Load driver.

*/

I downloaded the Intel C600 series chipset SATA AHCI Controller driver and put it a USB thumb drive, to no avail.

I just happened to have an external USB 2.5” SATA enclosure that I was getting for the wife’s Fujitsu tablet (circa early 2000) that got her thru her years in college and it had been ‘decommissioned’.

I plugged in the external drive into my 28GB Lenovo Thinkpad W530 laptop that is running “Windows Server 2012 R2” with Hyper-V and it detected a USB drive.  But, it wouldn’t show up in “Disk Management”:

nor in DiskPart:

Now, I did notice that there was a super brief pop-up:

When I went to “Server Manager” > File and Storage Services > “Storage Pools”

The 128 GB Samsung SSD hard drive had information about the “Storage Spaces” from which I was running the “Write-Cache” for “Storage Spaces” in the “Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Server”.

It’s a good thing that “Storage Spaces” has this safeguard mechanism in place.

Since I wanted to re-use this hard drive, I started with deleting “Delete Virtual Disk”.

Clicked on “Yes”

Searching with Bing.com for "Error deleting virtual disk" "Failed to find a server that has Read-Write access to this storage pool" it finds:

Modifying a Storage Pool that has a Read-Only Configuration

Refreshing “Server Manager”

Now, I see the only drive that I’m interested in.

Select “Remove Disk”

Click on “Yes”

And now I see the hard drive is available.

Now, I could go back at re-building out my 2nd node of Windows Server 2012 R2 w/ a Hyper-V Failover Cluster.

Yong

More information:

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Understand and Troubleshoot Storage Spaces in Windows Server "8" Beta