Safely remove a disk from a spanned volume

I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2 and converted physical disks to dynamic disks and combined them to a spanned volume. Yesterday, one disk started throwing S.M.A.R.T Errors, so I decided to get a new disk to replace it.

Now, I installed it to my system, converted it to a dynamic disk and made it part of the spanned volume. My Question is: How can I remove the old disk from the spanned volume, without losing data?

So it's just a plain old spanned, non-RAID-protected, volume right?

If, well you'll have to backup the entire volume, replace the disk, rebuild a blank new spanned volume and restore your data.

Essentially you have no easy way to do this, consider using some from RAID other than spanning's effectively R0 setup.

I've tested this on Windows Server 2012 R2. I had a 3TB spanned volume over three 1TB disks.

I just shrinked the 3TB spanned volume to 2TB in Disk management. This made all the space on the last disk unallocated. After this I was able to remove the disk without losing any data.

Unfortunately this solution will not work if you want to remove the first disk from the spanned volume.

Actually, for those interested in an answer besides "don't": I found this: http://richardbenson.co.uk/2008/10/removing-a-drive-from-a-spanne/

This seems to be the general method:

• Make sure there is enough free space to be able to remove one of the disks.
• Defrag the disk using jkdefrag to move all data to the start of the volume.
• Remove any crap that the defragging didn't, manually.
• Use the disk manager to "shrink" the spanned volume.
• Rebuild the partition table on the disk that has been shrunk out.