Friday, April 23, 2010

Windows Server 2008 - Offline Disks

So, on a new Server 2008 install, I couldn't figure out why my system disk was showing up in My Computer, but my additional storage disk was not. Apparently Server 2008 sees drives as "SAN Drives" and so some particular security policies take affect that force additional drives to be Offline. I went into disk management and tried to bring it online, and got an error that "This Disk is Offline because of a policy set by the Administrator". If you ever have this problem, the following solution worked for me:

[Taken from http://www.astroarch.com/blog/?p=104#more-104]

Using ‘diskpart’ enter the following commands:

DISKPART> SAN POLICY=OnlineAll
DISKPART> RESCAN
DISKPART> SELECT DISK 1
DISKPART> ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY
DISKPART> ONLINE DISK
DISKPART> CONVERT MBR

NOTE 1: The disk number you select varies. Windows uses a 0-based index for disks, so the system disk should be Disk 0, and additional disks will be 1, 2, 3, etc. If you go into the Disk Management (Server Manager screen -> Storage -> Disk Management) you should see all the disks, and it will give you each of their Disk numbers. Once you use all the commands above, they will go from offline to online in Disk Management.

NOTE 2: The Convert MBR command may not work. That's fine. If it's not the primary/system/bootable disk, it won't have an MBR, so the command will most likely fail.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for providing these commands, it will be helpful for me to use window server2008. I can easily use this during OSCP Certification course.

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  2. Worked a treat on Windows 7 64-bit pro. It wasn't a system disk so I didn't even bother with the MBR command. Thanks!

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