Storage Spaces on Windows 8.1 Pro not recognizing drive

Rhinofeed · November 2, 2013

Hello! I have a Windows 8.1 Pro machine that I use as a home server, and I was just about to set up storage spaces for a software raid system. When I create a drive pool, however, only one of my 2 data drives shows up even though both drives show up in Explorer and read / write fine. Is there anything I need to configure differently to get Storage Spaces to recognize that first data drive? Thanks!

Rhinofeed · November 2, 2013

It has something to do with the secondary drive being labeled an active system drive. I can't figure out how to make it inactive and how to make it a non-system drive. It's just a backup data drive so there should be no reason it's tied to the OS.

Rhinofeed · November 3, 2013

I'll just continue this post as I figure things out just in case there's anyone else out there with this problem. So now I've figured out how to mark the partition as inactive, however there may be a boot loader or something on it as it's still labeled as a "system" partition. I'm going to manually unplug the drive to see if it boots without it plugged in, if so, then it's okay to wipe it. However, it won't allow me to wipe it unless I use a Linux live cd or something. =\ Windows can be frustrating. Here is the link I found on how to mark the partition as inactive.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/197157-partition-mark-inactive.html

Rhinofeed · November 3, 2013

Didn't boot without the data drive plugged in. I had to burn a copy of Windows 8 onto a CD so that I could do a repair of the OS with the data drive unplugged. Then, when it figured everything out, I could plug the data drive back in and reformat it because it was no longer considered a system drive. Problem solved, albeit annoying.

ultimatemythbuster · November 6, 2013

Didn't boot without the data drive plugged in. I had to burn a copy of Windows 8 onto a CD so that I could do a repair of the OS with the data drive unplugged. Then, when it figured everything out, I could plug the data drive back in and reformat it because it was no longer considered a system drive. Problem solved, albeit annoying.

Lesson here is to never have more than your OS drive plugged in when installing an OS. If you have another drive plugged in, Windows might store data on that drive during the install even if you do not select that drive as the install location.