[Sussex] Recovering from RAID 5

[John Crowhurst]

Hello,

I have a customer that has a backup machine that was configured with RAID
1 (for /boot) and RAID 5 partitions (the rest of the system). I was called
to replace one of its 4 250GB drives and after replacement it appears a
second drive failed before I could introduce the drive to the array.

The machine boots and then immediately panics because it can only see 2 of
its 4 drives for the RAID 5 array.

I think the previous admin didn't have much in the way of a budget from
the company and they reclaimed old desktop machines as servers and spent
their money on drives.

Is there any way to recover the data on these drives. The drive I took out
wasn't even spinning and wasn't recognised in the BIOS as a drive.

The replacement machine will be 2x1TB drives in RAID 1.

-- 
John Crowhurst
John's Computer Support