How to remove traces of files marked as OFFLINE or DEFUNCT in Microsoft SQL server 2008? I have been playing around with a setup where I create a database with 3 file-groups which are: Primary, FileGroupData and FileGroupIndex. The clustered index is using FileGroupData and a non-clustered index is set to use FileGroupIndex. To simulate a disk failure I've shut down SQL server and manually deleted the files in index file-group. To start the database I'll mark the files 'OFFLINE', but after that I can't delete the index files, which are now offline. I don't have backup of the files as they are merely indices, but that has the implication that I can't restore the files and have their status as "ONLINE". How would you recommend removing the files and the file-group as they still show up in management studio under files/file-groups. Management studio is not able to delete them. As far as I can tell this is different from the question posted in : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/462637/how-do-i-remove-offline-files-from-a-sql-server-2005-database /Philip