# RAID 1 Software - The plex is missing



## ivanbcn (Mar 10, 2015)

Hello,

I have 2 external iSCSI drives 6.5TB each on my network attached to my Windows 2012 R2. I created a RAID 1 with the Windows software, and all was working fine. The drives contain only documents, and I have a backup of everything, so nothing is lost.

In order to simulate a real situation, I intentionally unplugged one of the external drives from the network, to see how windows reacted. The other drive kept on working fine, the users can keep on working with the documents, but when re-plugging the drive to the network, windows did not restart the sync. Instead, under Disk Management it shows both drives with "Failed redundancy". One of the drives appears with "Missing", and there is also another drive that shows as "Foreign".

Now:
- If I try to to reactivate the drive "Missing" it says "The plex is missing", and I can't do anything else.
- If I try to import the "Foreign" disk, it will import it as a different drive and I will have to restart the whole process of creating the mirror (so, delete the volume, create a new one, add the mirror, and wait for Windows to resync it... almost 4 days of resync...).
- I have also tried to disconnect the missing drive from the iSCSI Initiator, to reconnect it again afterwards and see what happens, but iSCSI Initiator hangs when I try to disconnect that specific drive, so I cannot even try this (though honestly I doubt it would do any good anyway).


So, I was expecting that when reconnecting the lost drive, Windows would find it and identify it, and restart the redundancy automatically. But the only possible solution I see is to really restart the whole mirroring process from scratch. This is a "valid" solution since I haven't lost any data, but it's definitely not what I would expect from a proper mirror managed by Windows 2012R2.

Any ideas? Am I missing something, or doing something wrong?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

Iván.


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