I've been asked to take a look at a server.

PowerEdge 1750, PERC 4/Di RAID controller

3x147GB SCSI drives RAID5, 2 partitions.

Windows Server 2003 32bit

No Dell OpenManage installed.

After a reboot, a message appeared saying there might be a problem with the power or cables to drive 2 and it wouldn't boot any further. I went into the RAID config, looked at the properties for drive 2 and it said "Not responding" but it didn't say it had failed.

I pulled the drive out and couldn't feel it spin down, I tried power cycling a few times and couldn't get the drive to spin up, I checked with a spare drive and that immediately spun up so I assumed something was wrong with the drive but the system couldn't detect it had actually failed.

I put the spare drive in and got the message "Unresolved configuration mismatch between disks and NVRAM on the adapter after creating a new configuration", again I thought this was because I'd put the new drive in so went into the RAID config. Auto rebuild was set to off for some reason so I thought it was just a case of going into rebuild and selecting the new drive and telling it to rebuild.

The drive was listed as online so it wouldn't let me rebuild the array.

I forced the drive offline and then selected rebuild, I left it overnight to do it's thing.

It rebuilt successfully and it told me to reboot, I rebooted, it goes through the RAID checks without complaining the tries to PXE boot, I assume it couldn't find an MBR on the C partition of the array.

I booted from a Windows PE disc I've got I could see the two partitions on the array, but it wouldn't display any partition size information for C, D could be read fine however.

I tried booting from an Acronis Disk Director Server CD, again it could see the two partitions, but clicking on C would freeze the software and I'd have to reboot.

So at the moment I'm stuck, it looks like the rebuild part worked but something corrupted.

Can anyone give me some advice on what I can try next please? Should I have done something differently?