# How to delete an unassigned primary shard
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-delete-an-unassigned-primary-shard/355446
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** ilm-index-lifecycle-management
**Created:** [March 15, 2024, 2:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-delete-an-unassigned-primary-shard/355446 "2024-03-15T02:45:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Churchill](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Churchill)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2024, 2:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-delete-an-unassigned-primary-shard/355446/1 "2024-03-15T02:45:20Z")
Good day,
We're currently experiencing an issue with one of our index (let's call it sample\_index) which has 21 primary shards with 1 replica. The primary shards of sample\_index are distributed on all our nodes. Unfortunately, one of our node's disk crashed yesterday, and needs to be replaced. This made the primary shard of sample\_index on that crashed node to be an unassigned primary shard, probably because it failed to be relocated due to the crash. This is causing our cluster in red state. I checked all other nodes, i can still see a primary shard of sample\_index intact.
How can I delete the unassigned primary shard w/o affecting the primay shard of sample\_index on other working nodes?
Here's the result when I ran allocation explain:
`curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/_cluster/allocation/explain?pretty`
```auto
"index" : "sample_index",
"shard" : 5,
"primary" : true,
"current_state" : "unassigned",
"unassigned_info" : {
"reason" : "NODE_LEFT",
"at" : "2024-03-14T13:30:11.936Z",
"details" : "node_left [HcOL6RzKQRegH4vwLg60jg]",
"last_allocation_status" : "no_valid_shard_copy"
},
"can_allocate" : "no_valid_shard_copy",
"allocate_explanation" : "cannot allocate because all found copies of the shard are either stale or corrupt",
"node_allocation_decisions" : [
{
"node_id" : "DugpqTy2T2mWAGCaj24gsw",
"node_name" : "inca-platform-es-nodes-001",
"transport_address" : "10.3.0.101:9300",
"node_attributes" : {
"xpack.installed" : "true",
"transform.node" : "false"
},
"node_decision" : "no",
"store" : {
"found" : false
}
}
```
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2024, 3:50am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-delete-an-unassigned-primary-shard/355446/2 "2024-03-15T03:50:46Z")
But you said you have 1 replica right?
Why the replica is not promoted as primary?
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2024, 3:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-delete-an-unassigned-primary-shard/355446/3 "2024-04-12T03:51:07Z")
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