Thanks for all the responses above.

and now that the cluster is back to shape and i would like to report back what was done.

1. Yes, the failed node was evicted from the cluster and did a Clean OS install on the new hardware

2. the Windows Cluster was reestablished and handed us ( our host service provider handles our OS and below)

--one thing I would like to add here though, make sure your Surviving node( the one having the SQL running) will NOT fail over to the new built NODE.

3. once I got the Windows cluster, i did run a Cluster validation report and it went well.

4. The I installed the SQL Server 2008 ( by choosing the adding new node),I had to run the installation by running from command line though. it went smoothly. 🙂

5. installed SP3

6. Installed other stuff (Oracle client for the linked server, and some other backup/monitoring utilities)

failover and fail back, things work as expected.

Yeah, we are being lucky, i think, this incident didn't create much drama. thanks for all the above inputs again.