PowerEdge 2850 RAID 0 Configuration – Drive not found

first of all, you need to get the system back online

1. insert both old drives in the slots they were in, go into the raid utility (Ctrl+A or Ctrl+E on POST, can't remember which one)
2. the utility might recognise these old drives and bring the array back up itself. If it doesn't, you need to remove the disks, clear the controller config, insert the disks back in, and create a new raid array, VERY IMPORTANT - do not allow the controller bios to initialise the array - this will destroy all the data you have.

at this stage you should have the old config back up and running.

next you remove the faulty disk, replace it with a new disk, and assign the new disk as hotspare. this will have the array rebuilding onto the new disk (using up 36Gb out of 146) after the rebuild is complete, replace the second 36Gb disk, and rebuild again.

this should place you in a setup where you have two large drives in raid-1, using up 36Gb on both.

What you can do now is create a new logical disk (raid array) on the rest of the drives, and either mirror it or use separately. this will give you the extra space as a separate partition

Either get a hardware RAID controller like a SmartArray P4xx or use software RAID. SW RAID works well on Linux - much better than Windows - so you may not need HW RAID.

The main advantage of HW RAID is battery backup which gives you a fairly good chance of surviving a power outage without corrupting your disk. You might find it worth your while to get a HW RAID controller for this reason.