Help with Dell 2900 server

[Hellen Keller]

hey all, i was recently given a dell power edge 2900, it had server 2003 on it, and the previous user asked me to wipe it, but all i had laying around was windows 7 home premium. Ok, i know the limitations, but thats not why im here. as i was in windows configuring everything, my little brother thought it would be fun to pull out one of the drives from the front cage, it has 4. now it wont boot into windows, and when i throw in my windows 7 disk to do a fresh install, it says that the drives cannot be found. now is this a drive issue, or a back plane issue, or raid card?

[Jarsky]

So the array has been dropped, maybe it was configured as *shivers* RAID0, or it could simply be an unpredictable failure. 

To find out the issue, you'll need to get into the Array Configuration Utility. If it has a PERC6i then you can press Ctrl+R during boot. Then you'll need to check what the array is doing. You can always destroy the Virtual Drive, and recreate the array. With all 4 disks you should ensure you create a RAID5.

 

You can also create a bootable USB/CD to perform hardware diagnostics using this if needed: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=4Y5N5