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Kuckucksei
Asked: 2011-03-24 02:44:29 +0800 CST

Safely remove a disk from a spanned volume

  • 772

I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2 and converted physical disks to dynamic disks and combined them to a spanned volume. Yesterday, one disk started throwing S.M.A.R.T Errors, so I decided to get a new disk to replace it.

Now, I installed it to my system, converted it to a dynamic disk and made it part of the spanned volume. My Question is: How can I remove the old disk from the spanned volume, without losing data?

diskmanagement windows-server-2008-r2 dynamic-disk

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    So it's just a plain old spanned, non-RAID-protected, volume right?

    If, well you'll have to backup the entire volume, replace the disk, rebuild a blank new spanned volume and restore your data.

    Essentially you have no easy way to do this, consider using some from RAID other than spanning's effectively R0 setup.

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  2. I've tested this on Windows Server 2012 R2. I had a 3TB spanned volume over three 1TB disks.

    I just shrinked the 3TB spanned volume to 2TB in Disk management. This made all the space on the last disk unallocated. After this I was able to remove the disk without losing any data.

    Unfortunately this solution will not work if you want to remove the first disk from the spanned volume.

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  3. Actually, for those interested in an answer besides "don't": I found this: http://richardbenson.co.uk/2008/10/removing-a-drive-from-a-spanne/

    This seems to be the general method:

    • Make sure there is enough free space to be able to remove one of the disks.
    • Defrag the disk using jkdefrag to move all data to the start of the volume.
    • Remove any crap that the defragging didn't, manually.
    • Use the disk manager to "shrink" the spanned volume.
    • Rebuild the partition table on the disk that has been shrunk out.
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