Need Help with WinSvr 2012 Storage Spaces

Howdy MS friends,

I used to be a fan of Windows Server 2012’s Storage Spaces:

http://blog.jasonbuffington.com/index.php/2013/06/checking-out-my-newest-storage-appliance-for-under-2000/

And for those that don’t know, I used to work at MS … on Windows storage features.  But I am totally stuck – and needing help.

Two of my five drives in a Storage Space failed.  So, like I would do with any other storage rack, I unplugged them and put in two identical HDD’s.  Technically, if this was a hardware array, I might have hot-swapped them, but I did power-down and then power up.

RESOLUTION ATTEMPT 1 — I added them to my set and voila!  The two new drives added themselves to the total capacity WITHOUT replacing the drives that had failed.  UGGH!

RESOLUTION ATTEMPT 2 — After searching the Internet (because the documentation wasn’t prescriptively clear), I found out that I should have added those drives as “HotSpare” and that Windows would figure out to replace it.  So, I added another exactly the same drive as a hot-spare watched as nothing happened.

RESOLUTION ATTEMPT 3 – So I rebooted, thinking maybe that would wake up the repair process.   And now, the management UI shows six drives in use … and the two failed drives still there.

Here’s a screenshot:

StorageSpaces-error1

I can’t click “Remove Disk” on the failed drives … because it says that I need to add new drives of equal capacity, blah blah.

I can’t click “Remove Disk” on the newly added empty drives (so that I can retry again) … because it says that they are part of the active set with volumes on them.

I can’t click “Repair Drive” on the virtual disks … because it says that the resources can’t be found.

Ideas?

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