"although expressing missgivings about our chances of success" They are trained to set "proper" expectations - don't get the customer's hopes up and let success be a welcome surprise. "I'm still amazed that Dell provides free support for these "older" servers.  Must be more to the story, but while it doesn't make sense, it sure came in handy for me." This practice was an awesome way that Dell stood out from their competition, being more concerned with helping customers (non-technical end users and support staff alike) work through any of their issues to protect company data, uptime, jobs, and reputation, than in whatever meager savings might exist in pushing unsupported systems out the door.  In 2009, they made a decision to no longer provide "free" support to servers shipped after a certain date (10/29/2009).  Dell stated that this would bring their service and costs inline with their competitors, but I believe it to be a huge mistake, damaging the reputation they had carried for years as the best "enterprise" support in the business.  Of course, not everyone knows that this service no longer is included with Dell servers and still believe they get top-notch support, but those who have been in the business no doubt sees it as a bad sign, whether we used the support or not (I don't, but it is extremely valuable to those who are not familiar with Dell hardware/software). Good luck!
Am running a Poweredge 1900 with Win2003.  It has four 73GB SAS disks in a Raid 5 configuration (PERC 5/i).  One drive failed... I could hear it clicking... so I downloaded the monitoring software, and it showed failed.  It was drive 2.  In trying to determine what type of disk was installed, I pulled out the bay a bit too far and, while the machine was powered up, the cable came partially loose from drive 0.  I didn't notice it until I saw the reboot process running on the monitor.  I opened the case and reseated the cable and tried to reboot again, but it would not boot and went to the "PXE-E53 No Boot Filename Received" message. After trying several more reseats and reboots, I got into the Raid configuration and the physical drives showed as follows: 0=missing, 1=Online, 2=Failed, 3=Online.   It also showed a "foreign configuration" message.  Based on some of the posts in this forum, I cleared the foreign configuration.  Now the drives show as: 0 and 2 missing, 1 and 3 online.  I have tried to replace the missing/failed drives with the new drives, just to see if it would affect the booting process, but it does not.  I'm really just trying to determine if there's any way to salvage the Raid array and the system without having to start from scratch.  I really don't want to tackle reloading Windows and reconfiguring the Raid, etc.  I've worked with a lot of PC's, but never have configured a server of this magnitude.  Anyone have any thoughts or advice?  Thanks!
Raid 5 failure, looking for advice/opinions