I have searched, but have not found anything quite like this.
OS: Windows Server 2012 Essentials
Storage Layout: 2x 3TB Drives Mirrored, 2.73GB total useable space
Problem:
I installed on a 500GB Drive, set up the Storage Pool (2x 3TB Drives Mirrored), then made a Virtual Disk (called "File Server") and all was great. Copied about 1.4GB over, then for some reason it was showing in Storage Spaces that all 2.73GB was used, but it was still showing that I had 1.3GB free in Computer. But that is not the main problem.
I decided I wanted to install the OS on a newer 1TB drive and I assumed that there would be no problem getting the storage pool to properly come into the new install as I have never had problems rebuilding mirrored arrays in the past. Well the virtual disk showed up in the server manager, but was not accessible (didn't have any options but to delete virtual disk or remove physical drives). I decided to put my 500GB drive back in with the original install. I was able to see everything fine here. I searched for a long time in Windows Server and online to figure out how to split my drives or evict one, but I couldn't find anything. So in my head I thought, "maybe if I remove the virtual disk it will automatically split the drives (yes, bad idea)."
Before doing this, I unhooked one drive that way I still had the data on it in case removing the virtual disk deleted the data. I could still attach the virtual disk with just one disk hooked up. I deleted the virtual disk and data was gone on the one drive. So I hooked back up my other drive and I could no longer access the files from that drive when the virtual disk was attached again (that makes no sense since it worked previously). I was still unable to remove the other drive that now had a yellow triangle and exclamation point next to it. So I could not find a way to split them still and now I had data on only one drive that was not allowing me to attach, and I did not have enough space to copy data back as I sold one computer that had 2TB of storage space that the data came from. I put the drive with the data on in an external and hooked it up to my computer with W8 installed. Storage Spaces came up and I was able to view the data here (not sure why W8 storage spaces would allow this but not Windows Servers???), but still no way to remove the "other" drive.
I put it back into the server and added the 3TB drive back into the physical disks of the Storage Space. Now it gave me the option to remove the "old" drive that no longer existed. Upon trying this, it says that the disk is still in use while before it said it no longer existed when trying to remove?? If I try to remove the 3TB drive I just loaded back into physical disks, it says that I need to repair the virtual disk (File Server), of which there is no option to repair.
So now if I try to put the drive with the data in my external drive, I can no longer view the data in Storage Spaces on W8 because of the added physical disk and the non-existent disk. I now borrowed an external with enough space to copy all the data over if I can just get the drive attached again, but I can't.
So no way to remove the non existent drive, no way to remove the new drive that has no data, and still now way to completely split the mirrored array. Am I missing something or what is going on? WS2008 seemed to have a lot more options in the RAID array department.
TIA