Wow did I have a nightmare of a scenario. I setup a Storage Space in Windows to pool two NVME drives together. Worked well but just didn’t give me the performance I thought I would get. So I decided to put them to better use in another system. I pulled them out and installed them in another system. Here was the mistake. I didn’t remove the storage space (storage pool) before pulling the drives. No matter what I did, they would not show up in disk management as individual drives. They would show in Device Manager but they would show as the storage pool size (that was setup in the other system) in Disk Management and be broken. You couldn’t delete it, format it, nothing. After searching and searching, I found that you can solve this in Powershell.
In PowerShell Run the following commands
Get-PhysicalDisk
This will list out the drives installed on this system and give you the Friendly Names. You will see the drive formatted with the old pool. It will have a HealthStatus of Unhealthy. To fix this, you will need to delete the Storage Pool. Let’s look at a list of the Pools.
Get-StoragePool
This will show you a list of the active Storage Pools. If you see one called Primordial, ignore that one. The other one is the one you need to worry about. Note the name of it. But before we can remove the pool, we need to remove the Virtual Disk in the pool. Let’s look at a list of the Virtual Disks.
Get-VirtualDisk
This gives you the friendly name of the virtual disk you need to remove.
Remove-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "VirtualDiskFriendlyName"
Enter “Y” and hit Enter. That should remove the Virtual Disk. You can run the Get command again to make sure if you like. Now we can remove the Storage Pool.
Remove-StoragePool -FriendlyName "StoragePoolFriendlyName"
Enter “Y” and hit Enter. That should resolve the issue. You can run the original Get command and see that the drive is now healthy. And it should now be in Disk Management ready to be formatted.
Hope this saves someone a lot of time. Enjoy!