GPT Protective Partition Prevents Creation Of Storage Spaces Storage Pool

I was working on a customer site today on a new JBOD & Storage Spaces installation. It should have been a pretty simple deployment, one I’ve done over and over.  But a simple step couldn’t be done. When we tried to build a new Storage Pool (an aggregation of disks for Storage Spaces) the primordial pool and the blank disks would not appear in Server Manager or in Failover Cluster Manager. PowerShell was no use either.

My first suspects were the LSI SAS cards. After much troubleshooting we found no solution. And then, I was mucking about in Disk Management when I saw something. I could bring disks online but they came up with strange behaviour, especially for new disks.

The disks came online as GPT disks, without any initialization being done by me. And the disks were … read only. They actually had a status of GPT Protective Disks.

A quick google later and I had a fix:

  • DiskPart
  • List Disk
  • Select Disk X
  • Clean
  • Repeat

With a bit of work I could have probably PowerShelled that up.

What do I think the cause was? The JBOD manufacturer supplied the disks. A part of their offer is that they’ll pre-assemble the kit and test the disks – no two disks from the same production run are made equal, and some are a lot less than capable. I think the tests left the disks in a weird state that Windows interpreted as being in this read only position.

The clean operation fixed things up and we were able to move on.

4 thoughts on “GPT Protective Partition Prevents Creation Of Storage Spaces Storage Pool”

  1. Bro, u need to put this page in first link in google..
    after 1 and a half hour, u solved my problem in 20 secs.. only had to assign a partition to the unallocated disk in disk management
    Thank you.

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