Storage Spaces - Unable to Remove Failed Drive / Repair Pool

I had 3x 3TB drives in a parity pool. It started to fill up so i added a fourth 3TB drive and months later one of the original 3 began to fail on me. Performance was slow, then slower, then it showed disconnected.

I retired the drive and added a replacement, literally the same model 3TB drive. I cannot however, get it to remove the failed physical disk and repair the pool. I even tried adding another 2TB drive i had available in case it needed the extra space (didn't make sense but i was reaching).

I get the "drive could not be removed because not all data could be reallocated. add an additional drive to this pool and reattempt this operation."

Any ideas on what i need to do? I have searched a lot and don't really seem to be getting anywhere. The only way i was able to retire the drive was through powershell. I'm assuming it's a GUI issue and perhaps i'm not approaching it correctly via powershell. Attempting to repair virtual disk didn't work.

Any help is appreciated! I really don't want to lose this data. I wasn't able to backup much before the drive failed completely.

Nada??

Doesn't apply to all problems here, but whenever you add any new drives to a pool, make sure you execute Reset-PhysicalDisk for the newly introduced drives just to make sure there isn't any old metadata from previous storage spaces activity. From what I've read, there could be some metadata lurking that you can't really see by normal means and it could cause trouble.

Reiterate: Don't reset drives that have data on them that you want. If you reset any drives already in the pool, the whole pool will likely be destroyed!

This is for adding a new drive to the pool or starting a new pool from scratch...

Reset the new drive (not all the drives!) BEFORE adding to the pool. You want to get rid of any possible lingering meta-data from some previous attempt to make Storage Spaces work. You might not even remember your previous attempts. When you add it to the pool, Storage Spaces supposedly puts new metadata on the drive (you won't see it though). Any old metadata might mess things up. It certainly won't hurt to clear it. You want Storage Spaces to see a nice fresh drive and to make new meta-data.

Also, be careful when using Reset-PhysicalDisk. Look the command up. Friendly names don't have to be unique and you might accidentally reset a drive you don't want to.

Are you using NTFS or ReFS?
How are your drives attached? Motherboard SATA? HBA? RAID card in JBOD mode? SAS backplane?