[jontz]

WOW....lot of activity on this thread since this morning.

The fast flashing system disk is indeed NOT GOOD. I am convinced now that your problem is not a hard drive problem, or at least a single hard drive problem. Just out of curiosity, did the disk 2 light ever go amber when you had the original orphaned drive in there? Normally it would if there was a problem...

If you set the new drive as a hot spare, it should immediately pick up the drive and put it back into the array. During this time, the unit is accessilbe via the web interface, and you can see the status of the raid rebuild. This proccess should take about 6 hours or so with 120 GB drives, so maybe half that with 60 GB drives. The fact that you are saying that it is frozen and seems to be in panic mode doesn't bode well. The problem with the 4100's is that the OS is in flashram. If there is something wrong with that flash, or any part of the motherboard, there is very little you can do to recover the data from the drives.

You might try as blue suggested finding a PC raid 5 controller and trying to rebuild the array that way. I'd be interested to see your results.

If you are going to pull the drives and put them in a PC to try and rebuild them, try putting a single blank drive in your 4100 and see what happens. I am guessing that it will still be in panic mode and won't install the OS like it should.

If you are seriously interested in that snap on ebay, let me know. I am thinking about picking it up myself and I don't want to get into a bidding war with you if you need it.

Phoenix, just FYI the IDE cables in a 4100 are not CS cables, they are straight IDE cables with only one drive connector on them. All four drives in a 4100 are set as master.