dell perc ide controllers

[scottyman]

does anyone have any major experience with these?

I'm still at a client site - having resorted to a manual disk clone of a server as a drive in a hardware raid 1 set was destroyed - for some reason the perc controller consistently identified the working drive as being in a failed state - and the non-working drive was consistently described as online. dell weren't able to help - but they did ship me a replacement controller, cables and two replacement drives - same size, but different models and geometries (which didn't help)
there doesn't seem to be a way to clear the failed status of the working drive - I'm worried that if it happens again - it will be another three day job to get everything working again!

[8bit]

I have some experience, although the IDE RAID cards we use on some of our PowerEdges at work tend to be the CERC model, not PERC (I thought PERC was the SCSI version).

Have you tried each of the original drives in the array on their own? If so, what you're saying is the controller said the dead drive was fine but the machine couldn't boot/read that drive but the working drive could be read/booted but the controller said it was failed?

I know there were some serious firmware issues with certain PERC and CERC cards a while ago, it may be worth checking the firmware revision on the card and applying new stuff if necessary. Dell often seem to ship machines with out of date firmware and BIOS images, we almost always have to update these on new servers, particularly for RAID controllers. Obviously you'll want to get the array restored to a healthy state first tho.

If I were in your shoes I'd connect the working drive and back up the entire contents using Ghost or similar then install the new controller, cables and drives and apply any and all relevant firmware updates. Then restore the backup onto the new array.