On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:45 AM, Mark Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
> I’m looking for some advice with a Dell PowerEdge server at one of my
> clients.

  Call Dell tech support.  It's free forever.  No contract needed.

  Here's my guesswork:

> The server has only four hard disks split into two virtual disks.
>  Unfortunately I cannot simply hot-swap the hard disk with the fault as
> there is only a single system disk – there is no mirroring.

  I'm trying to figure this out.  So...

Virtual Disk 1 = Physical Disk 1 (single disk)
Virtual Disk 2 = Physical Disks 2, 3, 4 (RAID 5)

  Why would you do that?  :)

> If I remove the faulty disk,
> insert two blank spares, create a virtual disk, mirror them and then build
> the OS, will the second, existing virtual disk in the RAID5 partition be
> available to the OS?

  That would be my guess.  But:

> Should I try and retrieve the data from the disks in
> the RAID5 partition before attempting to so anything (if so, what would be
> the best method for this?)?

  Since it sounds like you don't have a backup of some important data,
I would start there before I started changing things.

  I would boot from CD and see if I could copy the data off to network
or external media.  Linux supports all the Dell RAID controllers, last
I knew, so I'd prolly start there.  If you're not a Linux guy, you
could try UBCD4Win.

-- Ben

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

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