Windows 10 Storage Space Creation Error

Question

I've been having issues lately with an existing storage space. I had a drive fail and the storage space was too thinly provisioned to recover. I removed the drive from the space and recovered some of the data using a recovery software.

I didn't want to have the same problem again so I bought 4x5TB drives to add to the storage space. The storage space would then consist of 5x5TB, 2x4TB, 1x2TB, and 1x1.5TB. I attempted to add the 5TB drives to the space, but kept receiving errors. I decided to move the data to two of the 5TB drives, delete the storage space, and start with a new one.

However, I'm unable to create a new storage space using any combinations of the drives I've mentioned above. I've tried creating the storage space on two different Windows 10 Professional computers and always receive the error:

The Request is Not Supported.

I did some more troubleshooting and running the command get-physicaldisk showed all of the drives with a status of False for the field CanPool:

I then ran the get-physical | FL command and it shows the "Insufficient Capacity" for the "CannotPoolReason" for each drive:

All of these drives have been formatted and are completely empty. They all have GPT partitions and have no issues being used independently.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm pretty much out of ideas at this point. I can't find what is causing me to be unable to create a new pool with these drives.

Solution 1

I finally figured it out and was able to create the storage space last night. I tried running some "Advanced Tests" from the SeaTools application on the hard drives last night. I'm not sure which worked test worked because they would all stick at 0% and fail. It was either the "Erase" function or the "Erase Boot Tracks" that corrected the problem. I ran these two functions on all of the drives. Both processes failed and no changes appeared on any of the drives until I rebooted.

After I rebooted, I went to Disk Management and was prompted to initialize each of the drives with a GPT partition. I ran the PowerShell command and all showed a "CanPool" status of True. I still received an error when creating the Storage Space, but I clicked close and was able to finish the process. It formatted all of the drives and it is now up and running.

I believe the problem was related to these drives previously being part of a storage space. I think there was data written in the boot sector of the hard drive that the diskpart "Clean" function and formatting did not clear.

Solution 2

I had a similar issue but came across PowerShell Reset-PhysicalDisk which got rid of the spurious meta data on the drive, and permitted CanPool once again. Hope that helps.

Reference: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/powershell/windows/storage/reset-physicaldisk

Comments

[AdamH]

Thanks. I hope that I never have this issue again, but I'll give this a try if I do.

[FrankTheTank]

I can confirm this works.