Expand physical disk in Tiered storage on Windows 2012 R2

After encountering the same problem again, I tried the PowerShell cmdlets for the storage subsystem, and it helped overcome the problem.

All storage cmdlets can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

Using Get-VirtualDisk cmdlet, I was able to find out that the virtual disks have a property called IsManualAttach, which is set to true.

Using Set-VirtualDisk cmdlet, I changed this property to false, and all disks are now attaching at boot time without any problems.

There was no way to find it in the user interface, and there was no hints that there can be such a property. The GUI on Server Manager only showed me a yellow triangle beside the virtual disk names, and when you hover your mouse over it, it says "Unknown: Unknown". I feel online documentation is also not mature enough yet, but I'm very happy with the software.

I believe I've seen this once with a customer, and it seemed to just be a Storage Spaces bug. Rather than going to Microsoft for support on the issue though, they opted to just backup/restore the data and recreate the storage space and virtual disk.

This is not normal behavior though - replacing the physical disk should allow you to "replace" and "repair" with no issue. I'd recommend contacting Microsoft to report the bug / erroneous behavior if that's an option for you, otherwise you may be stuck recreating and restoring.

Still, as others have mentioned, you should definitely try a reboot. I'd also recommend testing with an additional replacement disk. Iulian's PowerShell command suggestions are worth a try too, but those did not work for me when running into this issue.