ghosting a failed disk in a raid 5 array?

[LBFlashWiz]

I HAD a 6-disk raid 5 till I lost channels 0 & 1 at once early one morning.

One of the disks is bad. fails SMART and everything. The OTHER drive works fine however the RADICORE card reads it as failed.

Its not the card cause I swaped it with a new one.

It is one of two things. Either the drive has some issues still.. in which case I want to ghost it to another spare disk. Ghost cannot even see the disks so I will have to initilze them. Does initialization write any data to the disk as I do not want to overwrite any metadata from the raid?

It could also be that the metadata is messed up and then its just SOL cause a two disk faulure on a raid 5 mean only one thing... Offline... for good...

Does initilizing a disk from a raid overwrite the metadata?
Any feedback? positive perfered+++

 

[Ice Czar]

with the help of some of the advanced switches in Ghost you should be able to force a sector by sector clone of the drive (as a single drive on its own channel to some target drive)
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/1998082612540625
provided you can get it recognized

do NOT reinitialize the array, that would clear the data

your metadata is striped and parity calculations of it (and the rest of the data) distributed throughout the array
as far as the filesystem is concerned, its just one big HDD

if its not a hardware issue, and you cant recover it via the RAIDcore troubleshooting proceedure
it s either time to write it off
or fork over the $$$ for professional data recovery
you need to get that drive recognized at a low level on the card and as part of the array inorder to do anything
(backup, rebuild)