Safeguards are put into effect so that normally you cannot bring a cluster disk group online on a node when only a minority of disks in the disk group is available. However, in certain situations, you may want to force the import of the disk group or find some other way to bring the disk group online. One example is a campus cluster situation with a two-node cluster, where each node of the cluster is located in a separate physical location and each node has an even number of disks, with the disks evenly distributed between the two sites. In such a situation, if one site goes down, the remaining site cannot access the cluster data because it cannot reserve a majority of the disks in the disk groups.

With Microsoft Failover Clustering and other cluster types, there are methods to allow a site with a minority of the disks to bring disk groups online, if necessary, until the site with failed equipment can be repaired. The following section describes these methods.