Mistake Replacing RAID 1 Hard Drive

Hello all,

I have a drive in "degraded" state that I am trying to replace, and I am afraid I made a mistake. I am looking for advice on how to proceed. I don't have specific hardware details as I am offsite, but PowerEdge, Windows 2000 and Perc 4 or 5 with OpenManage Admin.

Steps I have taken:

1)  I took degraded drive "offline" via OpenManage Admin (v4 or 5). I was presented with possible data loss warning, but proceeded anyways.

2) I had planned on hot-swapping the degraded disk, but I had trouble removing the lower horizontal drive tray (degraded disk 0:1). So I shutdown so I could try harder without crashing a head or something. I got the tray out with some force, but recall that when I shutdown, disk 0:1 was offline (by mistake actually). I believe that shutting down, especially with a disk offline was a big mistake? I hope I can recover.

3) I replaced the degraded disk while powered off (and degraded disk 0:1 offline)

4) Startup attempt appears to have to failed. I got as far as "Press ctrl+alt+delete to login" but after doing so, I never came to the actual login screen. It was late so I had power off and  leave work. Uhg!

I am trying to have a plan for Monday on how to proceed. My plan is to 1st get back to bootable state by:

1) Put degraded back in and try to startup.

a) If successful startup:

- Hot-swap degraded with new replacement disk.

- Bring disk back online and hope for auto-rebuild.

- Done.

b) If startup fails (cry):

- Reboot into controller bios and try to edit array there to bring disk 0:1 (still degraded) back to online state?

- Try to startup again (cross-fingers).

- Once booted, take disk 0:1 back offline then hot-swap degraded with new. Finally set disk 0:1 back online and hope for auto-rebuild.

If that doesn't work, I am very scared. Please review my plan and offer any suggestions as to how best to proceed. As stated it wasn't my intention to shutdown. I only did so because of troubles removing tray with degraded disk, and I did not want to crash a head or something with a jerk.

I am also a bit worried that I read that it's possible that a rebuild could copy new empty disk to other good disk if not properly swapped when the disk being replaced is 0:1 and not 0:0. Please advise if that's true and how to avoid THAT! :-)

Thank you,

Chris

PS. Just dawns on me that new drive is not formatted, do I need to format via bios before doing anything else, or should I just try to get back to bootable state 1st?