Recently shut down my SQL Server cluster for maintenance. When I powered on the server and performed healthchecks, I noticed that the SQL Server instance was not started. Tried starting the service and it failed.
Investigated the logs and saw the below error in the logs:
The media is write protected on F:\…….
Weird. Opened Disk Management and looked at the disks associated with this particular instance. As you can see below, the disk shows as Read Only.
Solution:
The easiest solution to resolve this is to use DiskPart and clear the Read Only attribute.
Open Powershell as an administrator and run the following commands:
DISKPART
SELECT DISK 2
Where the Disk Number matches the disk number in Disk Manager.
Attributes disk
You will see that the option under Read-Only is Yes.
Attributes disk clear readonly
Attributes disk
You will see that the option under Read-Only is now No.
Now that the disk is read/writeable, the SQL Server service will now start.
Cause:
The hardware provider in our case had set the disks to read-only on the SAN causing this issue.
1 Giant Nerd 