davidbarber.org

What to do with a disk that won't pool


*********
If you've got this error, you probably need to see a kitten right now
I recently decided to try windows storage spaces as a way to prevent bit rot on my photos. Given that there's two disks, mirrored, I figured I wouldn't lose much speed, and the read speed might actually be greater (I'm not sure, though I'll check).

So I went and bought a pair of USB drives, went to 'manage storage spaces', and clicked on 'Create a new pool and storage space'. Easy! Except then when I actually tried to create the space it blew up.

Can't create the pool
Check the drive connections and then try again

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk | ft friendlyname,canpool,cannotpoolreason,size

friendlyname           canpool CannotPoolReason               size
------------           ------- ----------------               ----
Crucial_CT750MX300SSD1   False Insufficient Capacity  750156374016
(this is actually someone else's example - I forgot to grab a screenshot of my error before I fixed it!)

I went and googled about a zillion solutions, but this is the one that worked for me:

First, use diskpart to clean the disk. I hope it goes without saying this will destroy any data on the disk. In fact, everything on here assumes you know that you will lose data on any disk you do these operations on. So be careful. Anyway, diskpart:

I then used the Reset-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName "[name of your disk]" command to reset the disk. As you can see, once I did that the disk became able to pool.

Once the disks were correctly set, I was able to go back to Manage storage spaces and create the pool.

If you're curious, once I had the drive set up as a mirrored drive (I used the drive letter 'Q', I then turned on integrity streams in Powershell

PS C:\> Set-FileIntegrity Q:\ -Enable $True

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-FileIntegrity Q:

FileName Enabled Enforced
-------- ------- --------
Q:       True    True
This is the Microsoft doc on integrity streams.


Please let me know if this has been helpful! If this has fixed your issue tell everyone about it! If it hasn't, let us know what else you've tried, and what worked for you!