Win 7 Disk Manager broken mirror import foriegn disk greyed out

Question

This is for anyone who is in the unfortunate position of being stuck with a broken mirror set on Windows 7 and how to re-connect it or Import Foreign Disks option is greyed out.

Background, I needed to upgrade my 128 GB SSD C:\ drive to 275 GB as I was down to only 10 MB of storage. I have a Mirrored 1TB drive using 2 x 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA hard drives. I also had a striped array using 3 more 128 GB SSDs that I used as temporary video streaming to my HDTV through iTunes down to iTV box as the SSD performance improvement was very noticeable compared to coming from the 1 TB mirrored drives.

Crucial drives now come with a onetime Acronis clone option that really makes this upgrade process easy. For safety reasons, I powered off the striped drives, connected the new 275 GB drive and ran the Acronis utility targeting the new 275 GB drive with my existing C:\ SSD 128 GB drive. The machine restarts and then this program runs without interaction nor any viewable feedback on screen. However, when it finishes, the machine shuts down and you can then swap out the old drive with the new one and sure enough, the machine boots up perfectly and you now have everything as it was but with all that extra storage, no other configuration needed. Well, except for the mirrored drives and the striped set once I reconnected those. But this part was anything but easy.

And here’s where I got a little scared and hope to help anyone in a similar position. The 1 TB mirror had all my personal data, but those were coming up in Windows 7 Disk Management as offline. I tried to reactivate them, but no luck. I had broken the mirror on the past and recreated it that way successfully, so I thought I’d go that route. This then caused both 1 TB disks to show up as foreign and offline. I was scared now. Also, the Import Foreign Disks option was greyed out, so what to do now?

Answer 1

To the rescue comes Diskpart the Windows command line utility for managing disks. I could see the drives as foreign but could not import them. I then checked the attributes of both disks. Select Disk 1 then “Attributes Disk” showed one as read only. Same with the other. I then followed the steps on https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askcore/2011/06/02/my-disk-is-read-only-help/ and “attributes disk clear readonly” then exit disk part after finished, for both disks. Exited Diskpart and opened up Disk Management again. At this point I finally got the option to Import Foreign Disks and sure enough, once I attempted on the right drive, my mirror came back on line 100% working! Rebooted and all back to normal with no data loss and the drives didn’t even need to re-sync!

The striped set then came back in similar fashion once I reconnected them and reactivated in Disk Management.