Cannot Delete a Storage Pool Because it is Read Only

One of the great things about later versions of Windows is the addition of Storage Pools.  I use them almost exclusively now instead of hardware RAID.  In so doing, I tend to ‘play’ often and reuse hard drives from different pools and inevitably, run into this error as the hard drive will report that it is still a part of a now defunct storage pool.  There are times when I go to delete or erase a disk and I get the following error “Error deleting virtual disk: The storage pool could not complete the operation because its configuration is read-only”.  This is rather easy to fix with PowerShell commands.

From the PowerShell prompt, type in
PS C:\>Get-StoragePool to retrieve a list of all storage pools.
Make note of the ‘FriendlyName’ of the Pool that you need to work with – I will use ‘Pool1’ as an example.
Now run
PS C:\>Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName "Pool1" | Set-StoragePool -IsReadOnly $false
If you are sure you have the right Pool, then you can now delete the StoragePool using the following command:
PS C:\>Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName "Pool1" | Remove-StoragePool
This will detach the hard drive from it’s old StoragePool and allow you to erase/delete it.