Replace Drive in RAID 5 Array

If you are feeling worried about the data on the drives, shut down the server pull the drives one by one and back them up with Norton Ghost or trerrabytes winimage on another machine that can read them.

Then just replace the drive with another one that is the same.

The RAID controller will rebuild it for you.

~~thekeyboardwizard~~

Its odd that the system wont boot to allow you to investigate - even in degraded state all the data should be accessible, at least enough to boot. I would be concerned about moving the disks en mass to another machine - the raid config is generally stored on the disks and controller... moving a working set of disks to another machine is fine, doing so with one member that has failed can be a tad risky.

Swapping the disk will make the system start the rebuild process, it will detect a new disk and start automatically but i would really want a working backup first. Is there no way to force a boot... what is preventing you from doing so, this could indicate another base problem ?

You should be able to remove the drive as it is hot swap. Replace with a new disk. Make sure it is a new unformatted disk. The PERC will do the rest.

You can replace the drive with a larger size if that is what you have.  If your original drive is for example 73GB size and you replace it with a 146GB drive it will work, you will lose the extra 73GB space though.

You need to see why the array will not boot the OS before you attempt to rebuild this drive or replace it with another drive. When the server posts does it say 1LD Found, 1LD Degraded (or Failed)?
Boot the server to the BIOS Boot Menu - F11 and tell it to boot to the C:\ Perc 5i Controller, if you OS will not boot you have bigger issues than just a drive offline

I agree the first thing you want to do is figure out why it wont boot into the OS.  The issue may or may not be related.

A RAID-5 volume has a minimum of three disks, and uses distributed parity to rebuild to a single replacement disk in the event of a failure.  In other words, you can lose one disk to hardware failure, and the RAID container has enough parity to rebuild the missing data from parity stored on the remaining two disk functional physical disks.

The PERC 5/i is an LSI based controller and is generally very good.
The blinking amber LED you have on the disk may however mean multiple things : Failed, Failure Predicted, Foreign, Rebuilding depending on the frequency of the blink and if there is any alternating green/amber sequences.

Reboot the server, and press Ctrl+R to enter the controller BIOS when you see it enumerate. "PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller FW rev : xxxx"

Look for a Foreign View "Tab" at the top.
If there is one, then attempt to import the foreign configuration and reboot.
If there is not, check the PD "Tab" at the top. (Physical Disks)
You may have a failed disk, at which point replacing is necessary.

**Be aware that Data loss may be in play here, so hopefully you've got a full, valid, and tested backup.**

Echo that ... go to CTRL-R and see what the status of your array is.  Check the status of each drive on the PD MGMT screen.

Sorry ... not sure why my post was so slow going through :)

Although, the boot loader files are distributed across the disks in RAID5 I don't think the boot sector is. Drive 0 in a RAID5 array always has to remain in first position in the array. Is drive 0 the failed drive?

A good thought, but this is a something I've seen dozens of times and just isn't the case.  The OS on a PERC 5 RAID 5 will boot regardless of the drive that is removed/failed.

When you attempt to boot, where does it stop?  What error message are you encountering?