I’ve been rebuilding some of my lab and demo machines running WS2012 R2 preview with RTM bits. As they are Cluster-In-A-Box systems, they have shared disk between them and an already configured Storage Pool. Once I did a clean install one node of the CiB with Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM bits – it sees the old storage pool disks and recognizes there is a storage pool available on the disks. I want to preserve the Storage Pool and its data, so it’s really an Import Storage Pool action I am looking to accomplish.

I found these steps from Martin Lucas on the AskPFE blog. (How to import a StoragePool)

1. Make the physical disks available to the server (I’ve already done that).
2. Right click the Storage Pool and choose Set Read-Write Access. Choose the server you want to enable Read-Write access.
3. Attach the Virtual disks back. Each disk has to be selected and re-attached.
4. Online the Volume (logical disk) to get it operational once again.

This works great, until you restart your system – at which time it recognizes the Storage Pool, but the Virtual Disks are not re-attached automatically. You can do this with a little PowerShell, since the GUI does not have the option to modify the “IsManualAttach” property.

Open your administrative level PowerShell prompt and type in the following.

Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach –eq $True}

This lists off your virtual disks where the IsManualAttach property is turned on and the disks will not auto-reattach on restart. You can see I have four of them for this demo box I use.

Now run the line again but include the following:

Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach –eq $True} | Set-VirtualDisk –IsManualAttach $False

There won’t be any output, since you are piping the results into the Set-VirtualDisk command which will modify the IsManualAttach property to false.

Voila!

My Imported StorageSpace will now re-attach my drives correctly, even on restart!