Question : Problem: DELL PowerEdge SBS 2003, RAID 5 Degraded, one drive offline...

earlier today one of my drives went offline for some reason. After i rebooted and CONTORL+M it seemed to find the drive and rebuild it. When i left the office 1-2hours later it was 16% done rebuilding according to Open Manage in windows.

Dell told me i should upgrade the drivers and firmware ASAP after the raid is rebuilt.

Just now i tried to connect to my server, but its down again. I wont know why its down till i get to work in the morning.

My question is this. Can i upgrade the drivers and firmware while its trying to rebuild?

WHat if i can never rebuild the system? shouldn't it continue to run with just 2 drives ? Its raid5.. i thought it should still be good.

What should i do?

Answer : Problem: DELL PowerEdge SBS 2003, RAID 5 Degraded, one drive offline...

I would wait for a rebuild before touching the firmware  After the rebuild do a backup as soon as possible.  Depending on the drive size it may take some time for it rebuild. Running a degraged set will make the server run a lot slower and another drive failure will cause an unrecoverable RAID failure.

I would also get imaging software such as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery or Altiris which allow you to image the server and if it crashes restore in a very short time from bare metal, no OS re-install required.