Perc 6/I degraded disk replacement

I have 1 virtual disk consisting of a mirrored pair of physical drives (4 total drives; 2 pairs of 2 each creating a spanned partition). One of the drives has failed and the VD status is degraded. I expected that I could swap in another drive for the failed drive and that it would just rebuild, or let me add that to the array and then rebuild. However I am getting a warning I want to ask about before I make a mistake.

The drives are in a standard drive cage and not a hot swap / plug in cage, so I shut down the system to exchange the bad and spare drives. On restart, when I Ctrl-R to get to the Raid config I get 3 warning statements on screen:

“Foreign configuration(s) found on adapter. Press any key to continue or C to load configuration utility, or F to import configurations and continue.”

“Some configured disks have been removed from the system or are no longer accessible. Please check your cables and ensure all disks are present. Press any key to continue or C to load the configuration utility.”

“The following VD’s are missing: 00

If you proceed (or load the configuration utility), these VDs will be removed from your configuration. If you wish to use them at a later time, they will have to be imported. If you believe these VDs should be present, please power off your system and check your cables to ensure all disks are present. Press any key to continue, or C to load the configuration utility.”

That last statement makes me afraid to do anything because I don’t want to lose the VD config. I put the old failed drive back in and I can enter the configuration utility without an error. I started the OS and was able to run a full backup, so in theory data is protected, but I would prefer to just replace the failed drive than start over and restore.

Should I use F to import the foreign configuration(s) or will that mess things up? Does that mean I am importing the foreign config on the replacement disk and then I can go in to the RAID config and clear that configuration from the drive and then add it to the array and it will rebuild? OR - if I do the import will the VD become corrupt?

I should mention that the spare drive I have was previously used in a different array. It has been cleared of its configuration (as far as I can tell it is now a blank drive with no partition info on it). I was wondering if that past use was something the controller was getting confused by as it may have seen this drive before.

Eventually I want to replace the other drives before they also fail, so I want to understand the correct process to do this one at a time.

Alternatively, bad disk exchanges seem so easy with a hot swap system - should I consider exchanging the failed drive while the system is running? The drive is a WD hot swappable SATA and the controller is a 6i but the drives have standard power connectors not a backplane like on my other servers. I don’t want to freak the controller out or cause more problems working inside the box while it’s on.