[ale] Hardware RAID5 recovery in software

[Dustin Strickland]

I just want to put this out there: I'm not *very* familiar with RAID,
but I get by. I have a unique situation and I'm not sure how to handle
it -- suggestions would be appreciated.

So, my client has a machine - an *old* machine - that was running an
ancient version of Redhat, acting as a Samba server. I'm not too clear
on the details of what happened, but the result: the motherboard in the
server is apparently bad. So is the RAID card that was installed. Also
one of the disks of the three that were installed. The other two work
fine. This machine will not boot, I tried everything. We've made the
decision to set up another machine to run Samba. Now here's the hitch.
The only available machine has only two SATA ports and we still need to
grab his old data.

Yesterday I used a Live USB stick to dd the data from both of the good
drives, one at a time, on to a third. Now, I don't even know if the
data is recoverable - after we started copying the second disk, we left
it to run overnight so I haven't been able to check it out. If it *is*,
how would I go about it? I've never encountered hardware RAID before,
either - would this even be possible to fix in software?