I put two new drives into the expansion bay of a PE2500. I did a low level format of both physical disks, then created a new RAID 1 container and let the scrub finish. I then proceeded to ghost an image of the OS back onto the new mirroed container, but at 6% it reports back write sector failed.

Upon reboot, the array controller reports status "Unknown" for container #0. When I enter into the COnfiguration Utility it reports the container as "Dead", and both drives are labelled "missing member".

What would cause a brand new, perfectly healthy container to fail? I have already replaced the 1x2 backplane kit with a brand new one but the same problem exists. Could it be the onboard Perc3/Di? The system BIOS and PERC firmware are the latest from the Dell support site.

Thanks,

Helios