"Thanks very much for your help. I have seen the driver link you referred me to previously. However, although its format is "hard drive," its installation instructions still refer to the individual driver exe needing to be transferred to a floppy. Is it incorrect? And if so, how would I approach running the update before the OS install?" No, it is not correct.  When that file is run, it will unzip/extract the files into a folder on your computer (C:\dell\drivers\R227150).  Those files can then be transferred to floppy, CD, USB, etc. to be loaded with the Load Driver link in 2008 R2.  The floppy version is restricted to floppy media only (honestly, I don't understand why they still use the "floppy" format, since the "hard drive" version will work for floppy media as well).  Don't be afraid to give it a shot and see. "You say that the RAID must be configured before booting to the OS DVD." This is true.  Since you already have it configured and an OS installed, you don't necessarily need to delete/recreate the array at this point.  Since the PERC does not support non-RAID, they have to be configured before Windows is capable of seeing anything. It is also true that 2008 R1 does have the drivers built-in, but Microsoft removed them from the 2008 R2 media as it dropped native support for miniport drivers, so adding the drivers is necessary in 2008 R2 with a PERC 4 controller. "The drivers for 2008 are set up correctly - so I don't understand what I could reconfigure using Ctrl-M that would affect things. " As I just said, because RAID is already set up, you don't need to do any more configuring (you didn't mention that an OS was already installed with RAID already configured - in the event it had not been configured, it WOULD make a difference whether it was set up or not). Let me focus what I've said into steps you can follow - I have done this dozens and dozens of times:  
Hi, While there are many solutions for installing drivers to servers without floppies, mine is the reverse - sort of. I need to install a RAID driver which seems only available as an exe which creates a floppy image. However, I have no floppy drive to create the image to. And the exe won't extract the files because I don't have the drive.
Driver exe will only write to floppy