Unidentified Whistle

I have recently inherited support for a new client's SBS, and have a
strange issue...

Server is a Dell PowerEdge 1800 with a Dell CERC SATA 1.6.6ch RAID
controller, running RAID5 with three disks (no hot spare) for a total
of 300GB storage, split into two partitions: an 8GB system partition -
drive letter C - and a second partition - with drive letter W - of
around 290GB.

Having been firefighting issues from the undersized system partition
and moved off everything I can, the time has come to re-size it to 30GB
(space being taken by resizing and moving the other partition). Took
two full images of each partition (using Acronis TrueImage Enterprise),
verifed all the images, and started an offline re-partitioning using
GParted (from a Parted Magic build).

Started by resizing/moving the W partition, which GPartEd estimated
would take up to 24 hours. Yuk. About an hour into this (just before I
was leaving site), the Dell box started emitting a constant,
fixed-pitch whistle. The re-partitioning seemed to continue OK, but not
only was the whistle a worry and an interference to work, but the box
is in the owner's home and would have prevented the family from
sleeping. I had no choice but to kill the re-partitioning, with a view
to restoring backup images to newwly created, suitably-sized partitions.

The whistle stopped on powering down (naturally), but now recurs under
predictable, reproducible circumstances: on boot-up, the whistle starts
precisely as the "LSI Logic MPT BIOS" banner appears on screen and
lasts for around 30-40 seconds up until the moment the OS startes
booting (whether that be SBS on the RAID array, or a CD-based boot OS).
This is the exact behaviour on every boot up.

Has anyone any experience of anything similar, or can shed some light
(or plausible theories) on this?

I am of course mindful of a hardware issue, but have not come across a
sound quite like this one. In the meantime, I have a restore of the W
drive in progress - it has another 8 hours to run, apparently - just in
case the server will continue to be useable. A call to Dell is in the
pipeline, but as the Easter break has started now here in the UK, this
is going to have to wait a while.

--
Regards,
Steve.
.

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