Cannot Delete A Storage Pool Because It Is Read Only

I do a lot of messing around with Storage Spaces. This can involve reusing disks that have been used in other pools – I want to erase the disks but I encounter an error:

Error deleting virtual disk: The storage pool could not complete the operation because its configuration is read-only.

This is easy to fix … with PowerShell. Get the name of the Storage Pool, also known as the friendly name – for example Pool1. Then run:

Get-StoragePool –FriendlyName “Pool1” | Set-StoragePool –IsReadOnly $false

Then if you are sure, you can delete the storage pool, thus cleaning the disks for reuse:

Get-StoragePool –FriendlyName “Pool1” | Remove-StoragePool

18 thoughts on “Cannot Delete A Storage Pool Because It Is Read Only”

  1. Wow… I fought with this for an hour and a half. This totally worked, and it was the ONLY solution that did. Thanks!

  2. Great post. Was struggling with other oddball issues, come to find out reused disks despite being cleaned, were still showing up in a previously configured storage pool. This worked like a charm.

  3. On my home server, I had a OS Raid 0 (2 x 500gb TB) configured at bios, and 3 x 2tb drives configured in Windows Server 2012 R2 as a Storage Pool, which was then divided into different drives.

    Unfortunately, one of my OS drives failed, and I accidentally wiped the Raid (please don’t laugh) by incorrectly removing the wrong drive.

    So I had to rebuild entirely a fresh install at OS, AD, DNS etc etc glad I took notes when setting it up initially. Taking the 3 x 2tb drives out to a caddy for wiping, I had this issue where the previous pool was in read only. Nothing I did in the GUI allowed me to “reset the disks” there were the read only issues in this article.

    I came across this topic, thankfully! I followed the advice to run the 2 commands within powershell and I was able to set the disks, 1 by 1, back to read write, then from there was able to delet the virtual disks, reformat and ultimately reuse the disks. Just make sure you run BOTH commands through powershell, and replace the quotes with quotes (as they were the “wrong” quotes)

    Thank you, you saved me 6tb and my sanity!

  4. Was struggling figure out how to delete server 2012 “Storage Pools” with invalid disks…Worked like a Charm First Time !

    Thank You !

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