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I'm trying to replace a failed RAID 1 drive in Win Server 2008 R2 Foundation and am running into difficulty.

See the image from Disk Management:

Disk Management

Disk 0 is the good drive from the original RAID array, Disk 1 is a new drive.

The 71mb "OEM Partition", as you can see has 100% free space. This is a Dell server and it came with this set up already. If I right click the volume I only get "help" in the menu.

I've mirrored the RECOVERY volume which I believe contains some (seemingly fairly useless) Dell recovery software, and I've mirrored the OS volume to the new drive. I haven't bothered with DATAPART1 yet since this is only a bunch of work files - there is no software etc. here.

The mirroring seems to have worked correctly, however I would expect to be able to remove Disk 0 from the system (by removing the SATA cable) and still be able to boot from Disk 1 only. When I try this, I get "No bootable media found" during the boot process. If I go into the Windows RE (I am having to use a Windows 7 disk as all that came with the server was a Dell recovery disk) and try Startup Repair it tells me it couldn't find any Windows installations. I believe when I unplug Disk 0, Disk 1 also shows up in the boot sequence as "Non-RAID" whereas I would expect it to show up as failed or degraded, since half of the mirror is missing.

Here is the output from bcdedit:

BCDEdit

I've never delved into the hardware RAID settings so don't really know what I'm doing there, I'm hoping there'll be a way to do this in software.

What's going to be the quickest/easiest way from here to get to the point where the new disk is bootable on its own? Can I do it through software? It seems to me like I'm almost there, but I am not experienced using BCDedit etc.

The ultimate goal is to take out the 250GB drive (Disk 0) and add in a second 2TB drive, then have the 2x2TB drives running in a mirrored set.

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  • You can use bootrec.exe to rebuild your boot sector. You should execute all four commands in the order in the article. The article refers to windows 7 but should apply to server as well. support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/927392 Jan 14, 2016 at 10:59
  • I flagged this as too broad. You ask numerous question within your post. You clearly have no idea what you are doing. You created a software RAID on top of a RAID controller. Serverfault is not the place to explain core concepts. -- No offense intended. But you should really, really, really ask your IT partner for help. He may also provide that ISO you need.
    – Daniel
    Jan 14, 2016 at 12:08
  • Fine. Where do I ask it? I asked a similar question on StackExchange and they said move it here. Does this mean there is nowhere on StackExchange to ask this kind of question? Where can I find a summary of what is and isn't acceptable to ask?
    – WhatEvil
    Jan 14, 2016 at 12:26
  • "If your question is about: managing the hardware or software of servers, workstations, storage or networks... Then you're in the right place!" serverfault.com/help/on-topic I'm sorry I didn't realise there was an exam I have to pass to prove some arbitrary level of prior knowledge before asking a question here. If I don't know what I'm doing, then set me right maybe?
    – WhatEvil
    Jan 14, 2016 at 12:29
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    Oh, you wouldn't believe how many small companies I already had to tell "Sorry, data is gone. Next time, ask us first". Yours sounds just like it is soon to become on of them.
    – Daniel
    Jan 14, 2016 at 13:01

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