Raid 1(Mirroring) in Dell Poweredge 2850

You will need the RAID driver. When you boot from the Windows installation CD it will ask you to press F6 for drivers. Hit F6 and have your RAID driver available on a floppy.

At this point you should see your configured array and be able to install or partition as necessary.

Since you do not have a floppy drive, the only other way to get drivers loaded is to slipstream them into the installation, and burn a new install CD/DVD. Check out nLite to get this done.

Or, install Server 2008, which will most likely have the driver in it's list.

EDIT: As others have mentioned, you could also use the Dell recovery disc that came with the server, or order one from Dell.

PERCs have generally been fairly good about this for me. I don't have a PERC 4e/Di handy, but the general procedure has always been (for me):

• Remove all disks from the recipient server and reset all controller configurations to factory default (no virtual disks defined).

• Insert the donor disks to the recipient server. If at all possible, insert the donor disks into the same slots in the backplane as they were in the original server. Boot the recipient server to the PERC configuration BIOS.

• Use the "View / Add Configuration" function under the "Configure" menu. This will cause the PERC to read the configuration off of the disks.

I'm not able to test this right now so take this advice w/ suitable caution and care. If you don't have a backup of the data on the drives make one now. (Being RAID-1 from a PERC you should be able to mount the disk on a non-RAID controller and read the contents. PERCs, historically, haven't used any proprietary striping format for RAID-1.)