Win8 Storage Place one hard drive is bad

[David Rich]

I have one hard drive out of two in the storage place that has gone bad. Since the second one is a mirror copy, I am not worried about the data, but how do I go about getting the bad hard drive out and a new hard drive in?

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi David, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Tell us as much as you can about your computer setup, manufacturer, MB, CPU, Win version, make, model #, size of your HDDs, etc. Also how you have your RAID 1 installed (as a Storage Space Mirror in Win-8, as RAID 2 in Win-7, in a NAS storage unit as a network component). Also other HDD's on your system and how they are configured.

That way someone will be able to give you the best answer to solve this issue.

As a general rule with RAID 1, you can remove it and replace it with the same size HDD, and after rebooting, resynchronize the new drive in the Mirror.

 

[David Rich]

John,

My computer is a Lenovo ThinkPad X201 laptop. It is about 2-1/5 yrs old. It is an i7 CPU and 8 GB of RAM. It has 32 bit Windows 8 installed. It has a 256 GB SSD installed. I use two external 500GB HDDs so I can use the Windows 8 Storage Space Mirror in Win-8 RAID so I can have two copies of the data for such a thing like a HDD goes out. The only problem is, nobody has told me how to the "general rule" to get one HDD out and another one in. I am pretty stupid, but I understand you were trying to tell me how to do it, but I am a little more stumped. Can you tell me how to "remove and replace" it? How do you resynchronize the new drive?

Thanks a lot!

David Rich

 

[popatim]

Disconnect one of the external HDD's and see if the bad one or the good one is still connected. Figure out which one is the bad one and fixing it is as simple as buying a new one, re-attaching it, and starting the rebuild if its not automatic.

Or does your external device contain both drives in one enclosure?
We would need the make and model number of this to help you further but if you still have the manual around, the info would be in there.

 

[David Rich]

popatim -

They are not in one enclosure. I did what you said in your first paragraph, and that is why I am puzzled. I put the new one in without the bad disc, but Win-8 still said the bad one is there right along with the good one in the Storage Space named. The new one is not in the named Storage Space, but it is recognized as a single disc drive.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi Dave,
Here is a good and thorough article regarding storage spaces, and how to replace and resynchronize a mirrored storage space.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

You may not have given the storage space time enough to resynch or didn't manually start the resynch process.
There is a lot to be learned about the new storage spaces, and this 60 page article explains most.

 

[David Rich]

John,

Thanks!

David Rich