Poweredge R210 showing raid degraded on startup

Does this indicate that drive 1 is bad and should be replaced?  If so, should I replace the drive and let it rebuild on its own or do I need to first undo the raid, replace the drive, then recreate the mirror?

What makes you think drive 1 and not drive 2 (or 0)? If you replace it, there is no reason to "undo/recreate" ... you replace the drive, and if it doesn't automatically rebuild, then you assign it as a hot-spare to start the rebuild.

Or is there something else I need to be looking at?

What drive make/model are you using?

Thanks for the information. Looking at the raid from bios it shows it is booting from drive 0, so that is why I am assuming drive 1 may be bad.  The drives that are in there now are Dell made by WD - 50XV4 Dell 1TB 7.2K 3.5 SATA HDD

You'll want to make sure you have a good backup. If the virtual disk is showing an error, but not on either drive, then it is likely the array is corrupt.

If using the onboard S-series RAID controller, you are probably seeing Virtual Disk 1 as the boot drive. Only in the RAID configuration utility can you see if you have a drive that is offline/failed.

After making the backup, what is the best course of action?

The controller is the SAS 6/ir.  I used ctrl-c to go into raid bios but didn't see the virtual or physical drives, maybe I missed the menu option?

You spoke of a virtual drive ... where did you see that? if you don't see it in CTRL-C, are the drives listed in something non-RAID? or maybe they aren't managed by that controller at all ...

I believe I saw the virtual drive in open manage, but I wasn't able to see physical drives there.  What I saw when I went in via ctrl-C was a pull down that offered changing the boot drive to either 0 or 1.  If there were more options, I didn't see how to get to them but I may not have spent enough time looking.  I'd like to go back onsite this week with a new drive and hopefully figure out the right remedy.  The SAS 6/ir is listed on the original Dell system configuration, but it sounds like you are saying the drives could be connected to something else, like motherboard connectors?  Is there another bios option I should try, like ctrl-r?

I took a closer look at the server.  In Open Manage it shows that the controller is SAS 6/iR.  There are 2 connectors.  Under connector 0, it shows one physical disk 0:1.  Under connector 1, there are no physical disks.  Under virtual disks, it shows virtual disk 0 Raid 1, and there is an error triangle next to it. Under virtual disk 0, it shows physical disk 0:1.

I also looked closer at the bios setup, via control-C.  By opening the raid setup, it showed 2 physical disks as follows:

Slot Number     Raid     Hot spare      Drive status

1                        Yes      No                 Primary

----                     Yes      No                 Missing

I did open there server and there are 2 physical cabled drives,  All connections are secure.  Does this indicate that drive 0 is the bad drive or is there more going on here?

I went ahead and replaced drive 0, using a Dell drive that is the same part number as the failed drive.  The drive did not automatically rebuild but now in Open Manage I see 2 physical disks under the virtual drive.  Drive 1 shows online with no errors.  Drive 0 shows offline with status critical.  I tried to assign drive 0 as a hot spare, but this option is not available under the task pull down.  It shows only - no task available.  Another thing I noticed for the virtual drive under hot spare policy violated - yes.  How can I get the new drive to rebuild?  Could the controller also be a problem?

Anyone have a suggestion on this?  Is my only option to backup, delete and recreate the array, and then restore the backup?