Virtual Machine disks are attached to a machine that no longer exists

Question

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/WAVirtualMachinesforWindows/thread/2695008b-59e7-478b-8169-8ceb9b0d848d
Continuation of the above issue..
I've deleted a machine via power shell but the disks are still associated with the old machine.  I also see a disk there that belongs to a machine that was deleted a couple of weeks ago through the management console.  Is there any way to resolve
the associations? 
I'd like to delete the one disk that belongs to the older server but I need to retain a couple of disks that pertain to the server mentioned in the above referenced thread where I was trying to resolve an unknown state by deleting and recreating the machine
through power shell.

Answer 1

I found the command to use to remove these disks using the Windows Azure Powershell cmdlets:
Remove-AzureDisk -DiskName <string> -DeleteVHD
Output:
OperationDescription       OperationId                OperationStatus
Remove-AzureDisk           xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx... Succeeded
It took a bit of fiddling around with management certificates to get the Get-AzureDisk cmdlet working, but once that is done this removed both the disks from the portal, and the associated VHD files from blob storage.
Here are the steps I used:
 C:\PS>$subID = <Subscription ID>
 C:\PS>$thumbprint = <Certificate Thumbprint>
 C:\PS>$myCert = Get-Item cert:\\CurrentUser\My\$thumbprint
 C:\PS>Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName "MySub" -SubscriptionId $subID -Certificate $myCert
Then Get-AzureDisk works and you can proceed with removing the disk(s).