Windows 8 Storage Spaces can't remove faulty drive

[PhilPC]

So a drive in my drive pool became marked as disconnected (pictured below as the Hitachi 120GB), and my storage space became locked down earlier today. The drive did not appear in device manager of this machine, nor on another machine with windows 7, however was visible in the bios of both motherboards.

Since then I've thrown a 2TB Barracuda (pictured below as Something Borrowed) into the same port as the Hitachi, with the intention of Storage Spaces rebuilding itself.

When trying to remove the Hitachi from the pool, windows says it cannot, after the first attempt at doing this, Windows marked the drive as retired, instead of disconnected.

this is odd, because there is more than enough capacity, especially with the additional 2TB drive that I thought would replace the 120GB drive

The motherboard only has 8 sata ports, including the one being used for the OS disk, and I don't really intend on buying a controller card for a while. Any ideas on how I can get the storage space back up??

[PhilPC]

Update 20-March-2013:
The controller on the Hitachi has somehow sorted itself out when I plugged it into one of the chipset's sata ports instead of the 3rd party controller's. However now that it's been marked as retired, I can't unmark it.
Update 23-March-2013
I installed and app called ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery, and ran it.
Storage Spaces has gone into a repair mode and seems to be repairing itself on it's own accord.

To use the File Recovery, and Deep Scan features in ReclaiMe requires a licence key which costs ($299.95),
however as Storage Space seems to be doing some kind of a repair, I think I'll let it finish, and see what happens.
I've really had enough with Windows 8 at this point, especially with Live Support on the Microsoft website requiring a surcharge, despite having a licensed copy of W8 pro.
I intend on moving to flexRAID on ubuntu once I can move my files out of the pool

[PhilPC]

Update and Conclusion
ReclaiMe seemed to trigger some kind of repair mode that was not available originally in Windows 8 Storage Spaces.

For anyone else with issues removing drives, and repairing their pools, I suggest using this app.

I tried to get live help from MS Support's website, and after providing my Machine ID, with a fully Licensed OEM Windows 8 Pro,

they were going to charge me again, with no guarantee that the issue would be resolved.

I believe this is unfair as their product which I paid for did not perform the service that I bought it for.

I will certainly not be buying, or recommending MS products to anyone ever again, just because of the lack of service that comes with the product.

[aaronsace]

To force a repair, just run this command in PowerShell:

Get-VirtualDisk | Repair-VirtualDisk

[Kyuubixchidori]

 

To force a repair, just run this command in PowerShell:

Get-VirtualDisk | Repair-VirtualDisk

this is like 2 years old mate

[colonel_mortis]

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