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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?

Kuckucksei
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4 Answers4

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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.

Chopper3
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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.

RoelVB
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4

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.
noio
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0

Safely remove a disk from a spanned volume without losing data

  • Shrink spanned volume as per size of the disk you want to remove from Disk Management Utility

  • Make the unallocated space of the disk equals to the size of the disk

  • Remove the disk

QamarZ
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