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I have inherited a Windows 2008 server setup with 2x 160GB Seagate boot drives and 2x Western Digital 1TB data drives. This is one of two servers inside a school. They are three years old and part of a system built by a parent. The school doesn't want to pay too much money but wants it working ASAP.

I have identified that one of the 160GB drives has failed and the system will not boot after installing some updates. I went into the RAID bios and it said that the drive won't verify but could be ????.

I can't source an identical disk - it's a 7200.10 - but I have found an elderly 7200.9 version. Do I put that one in and is there a possibility that it will rebuild?

Or can I pull the offending drive and boot with just one drive?

I have MS Windows backups of both the system and data drives.

What would be the best thing to do?

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You should be able to boot with a single failed member in a mirror. The fact that you can't is concerning and is generally a sign that the mirroring was not done properly.

There is a hidden system partition, usually 100MB, that must also be mirrored. I'm guessing that this was not done, and thus the system is not bootable. In this case, you'll have to restore from backup, including that 100MB partition (you were backing that up, right?) either on a new mirror, or on the existing degraded mirror. Then reconfigure the RAID so that everything on that disk is mirrored, not just C:\

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Any drive that is of roughly the same spec and at least as big should work.

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