Well, this isn’t looking promising–my new drives arrived, but the big RAID array is throwing errors left and right. I’m not sure how much data I’ll be able to recover off the thing. Most of the data on the drive is reconstructible, but not everything. Most of this contents are old digital pictures, but I’ve tried to write them all to DVD before throwing them onto the RAID array. Odds are I missed some stuff, though.

Amazingly enough, the system logs seem to have survived unscathed, so I’ll write up a “anatomy of a drive failure” article later, showing what this looked like from a SMART perspective. Since I’ve never actually seen a SMART-monitored drive failure before, it should be somewhat educational.