Patent ID: 8868969

Claim:
A method for execution by one or more computers associated with a dispersed data storage network, the method comprises: determining that a disk drive of a slice server has been replaced with a new disk drive; identifying a data slice that was stored on the disk drive; identifying a data segment based on the identified data slice, wherein the data segment was encoded in accordance with an information dispersal function to produce a set of data slices, which includes the identified data slice; identifying one or more other slice servers that are storing other data slices of the set of data slices; retrieving, from the one or more other slice servers, a sufficient number of the other data slices to reconstruct the data segment; decoding the sufficient number of the other data slices in accordance with the information dispersal function to reconstruct the data segment; encoding the reconstructed data segment in accordance with the information dispersal algorithm to produce a new set of data slices; and selecting a data slice of the new set of data slices as a rebuilt data slice of the identified data slice.