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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:

get-physicaldisk

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

get-physical | FL

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.

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  • I am wondering how Windows can know a disk has insufficient space to be in a pool if it not already in a pool. I have only dabbled in storage spaces, but have you considered if "Reset-PhysicalDisk" is appropriate? I really don't know.
    – Yorik
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 18:58
  • I can attempt that command and see what happens. Does this command reset all physical disks? I just want to be sure it doesn't cause issues with my boot disk. Also, does reset mean it clears the partition. I have used the "clean" function in diskpart for each disk and created new GPT partitions for each.
    – AdamH
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 19:30
  • I got the command from the MS documentation: " a destructive operation that removes the storage pool configuration and pool data from the specified physical disk." Sounds dangerous :) ( technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848660(v=wps.630).aspx )
    – Yorik
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 20:32
  • It does, but that sounds like what I need to do. I'm going to give it a shot when I get home. I may connect the drives to my old laptop and run the command from there first. I'm always worried I'm going to typo the wrong disk number and clear the boot disk.
    – AdamH
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 20:50
  • It is unclear to me where that pool data resides, but I doubt it lives on the drive itself. I usually copy/n/paste GUIDs, but that command allows for a friendly name also (check the example at the bottom of the docs). Storage Spaces caught my eye since I just set a simple one up yesterday. Post back your solution.
    – Yorik
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 20:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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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

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  • Thanks. I hope that I never have this issue again, but I'll give this a try if I do.
    – AdamH
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 17:44
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    I can confirm this works.
    – Tobias Reithmeier
    Commented Sep 19, 2017 at 11:28
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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.

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  • so I guess it really does write the pool information to the disk.
    – Yorik
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 15:25
  • That is my assumption, but I'm not really sure. I would assume it has to because you can take the drives from the PC where the storage space was created, plug them into any computer, and the storage space is recognized. I've actually done this before and the storage space was available with all my files. There has to be a more efficient way to delete the boot tracks from the drive. That would be my suggestion if anyone else runs into this issue.
    – AdamH
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 17:10
  • @AdamH How long did it take to run "Erase Boot Tracks"?
    – André Christoffer Andersen
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 9:16
  • It has been so long that I don't completely remember. I don't think it took more than 5 minutes though. It seemed to be a pretty quick process.
    – AdamH
    Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 3:36

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