Dead Spanned Volume

[lrdbelial]

I have a 1Tb spanned volume (5x 200gb) on a Windows 2003 server. Recently, one of the drives died. I still have access to the spanned volume but it is painfully slow and frequently freezes. If I take out the dead drive, Windows will not mount the volume. Is there anyway to take out the dead drive and force windows to mount the volume with the missing drive? Should I just cut my losses, backup what I can and wipe all the drives? Any suggestions are appreciated.

[Snugglebear]

Recovery from a failed span is pretty standard - bust out the low-level recovery tools and try to grab as much as you can off the individual functioning drives. A lot of data is going to be gone, though. Spanning has no redundancy and increases susceptability to failure, as you're finding out. Seriously look into both RAID5 and a backup system.