Q: After I reinstalled Windows Server 2012, my Storage Spaces are no longer writable or automatically attached--what can I do?

A: If you take the physical disks that were used to create a storage space and move to a new server or reinstall the OS, you may find the storage pool (storage space) in Windows Server 2012 is set to read-only and any virtual disks may not attach automatically. You can manually attach the virtual disk using the Storage Pools area of Server Manager as shown.

Storage Space

Use the Windows PowerShell command below to check the read-only state of the space:

PS C:> Get-StoragePool FriendlyName OperationalStatus HealthStatus IsPrimordial IsReadOnly ------------ ----------------- ------------ ------------ ---------- Primordial OK Healthy True False Data1 OK Healthy False False

In this example the storage pool is not read-only, but to set any storage pools to writable that were read-only, use this command:

Get-StoragePool | Where-Object {$_.IsReadonly –eq $True } | Set-StoragePool –IsReadonly $False

To look at the virtual disks, then set to auto-attach, use the following (note the IsManualAttach attribute):

PS C:> get-virtualdisk FriendlyName ResiliencySettingNa OperationalStatus HealthStatus IsManualAttach Size me ------------ ------------------- ----------------- ------------ -------------- ---- DataMirrored Mirror Detached Unknown True 1.3 TB PS C:> Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach –eq $True} | Set-VirtualDisk –IsManualAttach $False PS C:> Get-VirtualDisk FriendlyName ResiliencySettingNa OperationalStatus HealthStatus IsManualAttach Size me ------------ ------------------- ----------------- ------------ -------------- ---- DataMirrored Mirror OK Healthy False 1.3 TB