I have a Dell T-100, running Win2k3, that operates mainly as a terminal server, but also has an ACT database that several users access. It has two 160G HDs set up as a RAID 1. Lately, the server has been sluggish & I started digging for reasons why. Since it's still under warranty, I go Dell on the phone & tech support guy II talked to came to conclusion that both drives have bad blocks on them, referring to it as having a 'punctured stripe' & told me I would have to replace both drives & basically reinstall everything from scratch, including re-creating any data I have on it! After running Dell diagnostics from a CD (couldn't do it when originally on the phone with them), it was discovered that drive 0 has some bad blocks & drive 1 is fine. I'm wondering why I can't move good drive to 0, add new drive & let RAID rebuild it self. Dell TS says data has been corrupt & it will propagate to new drive, which is the same reason I can't restore anything from backups either, saying the data itself is corrupt as well, and that I basically have no other choice than to re-create the data from scratch, as well! I've been in IT for about 13 years & have never heard of such a thing. If data cannot be restored from a backup, what can be done to safeguard against this in the future? Oddly enough, this is the 3rd time I'm having to replace a HD in this server & no one has ever suggested this as being my problem in the past. Current tech I have been working with even tells me this is probably why I'd had to replace 3 HDs over past couple of years! Any thoughts and/or suggestions? Thanks!

Probably not the best forum to post hardware related questions, but I'll give my best answer anyway. I believe the advice from Dell is correct in this circumstance, however, if you remove the problematic drive (shutting the server down first of course) and run the system on the good drive alone, you might be lucky and everything will still be working and / or performing better than before - of course, there are no guarantees there and with your past history of drive replacements, the long term prognosis would not be good.

Wasn't sure where to go with this, so I figured General would be a good place to start! Will post to a hardware related forum, as well. So, if I were to do that & things ran smoothly, could I assume (uh-oh!) that adding the new drive & letting it rebuild that all should be ok?

I think my best answer is probably. You might be best off to take an image of the good drive before proceeding.