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I'm trying the new "Storage Pools" feature on Windows Server 2012, and I've created several disks on the pool.

When I restart the server, some of the disks (two, out of four) do not attach automatically, and don't show up in the list of disks.

I can go to Server Manager > File and Storage Services > Storage Pools, and the faulty disks are listed with a yellow triangle beside them. The drive health in the properties are "unknown".

But if I right-click and choose attach, the disk comes online, with all the content on it intact. But after another restart, it's the same story.

I didn't find any relevant event in the event log, how can I find out why the drives are not attaching?

Iravanchi
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  • how are they plugged into the machine? If they are SATA or SAS, does swapping them to a different port show the same issue? – TiernanO Sep 19 '12 at 12:29
  • They are consumer SATA drives. Actually I removed the disks and created them again and they work flawlessly now. But my question is mainly about an approach for troubleshooting, since I couldn't find much troubleshooting UI nor documentation about the new storage pools tech. – Iravanchi Sep 19 '12 at 19:17
  • right, i get you know. I did see something about SAS controllers being able to tell you which drive was faulty, but since your drives are not faulty, i dont know what to tell you... could be as simple as a loose connection (unlikely) or just a bug... – TiernanO Sep 19 '12 at 21:48

1 Answers1

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After encountering the same problem again, I tried the PowerShell cmdlets for the storage subsystem, and it helped overcome the problem.

All storage cmdlets can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

Using Get-VirtualDisk cmdlet, I was able to find out that the virtual disks have a property called IsManualAttach, which is set to true.

Using Set-VirtualDisk cmdlet, I changed this property to false, and all disks are now attaching at boot time without any problems.

There was no way to find it in the user interface, and there was no hints that there can be such a property. The GUI on Server Manager only showed me a yellow triangle beside the virtual disk names, and when you hover your mouse over it, it says "Unknown: Unknown". I feel online documentation is also not mature enough yet, but I'm very happy with the software.

Iravanchi
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