Raid 5 failure with PowerEdge R515 Server

Hello,

Just this morning our Dell server decided to crash and never recovered. Upon connecting a monitor to the server we see it at the system recovery screen giving us the option to restore from a previous backup (there are none), command prompt option, and boot system (just returns us to recovery screen). We rebooted the server and went into RAID configuration mode (ctrl-r) and see the following message that Raid is in a degraded state. None of the hard drives show an orange light and when in the RAID configuration mode we notice that drives in slot 0 and 2 are in the Online state and slot 1 is in ready state. We have done researching and thought that our slot 1 drive may have gone bad so we went out and bought the same spec type hard drive, installed it, delete the virtual drive that was given to it and made it a spare and still nothing happens. It never rebuilds and joins the existing raid 5 configuration. The system uses PERC S300.

Any thoughts and help would be very much appreciated. The data on these drives are an absolute must recover information and we're at roadblock on how to get this server back up. We thought we were in the clear and would do a comple recover by using the backup that was scheduled last night but we found out this morning when this happened that the backup partially failed and only backed up a small amount.

thanks!

John