How to recover from a drive failure.

How to recover from a drive failure.

[David Greaves]

Hi

I have raid5 setup and a disk died a couple of weeks back.
The RMA return arrived this morning and, as luck would(n't) have it, 
another raid disk died too.

The disks are Maxtor 250Gb SATA running through a Promise TX4.
It's a shame SMART doesn't work yet - but they are running cool (12cm 
fan pointed at them) and well powered.

Anyways, now I have a dead raid device :(

Since I have a good disk I was going to:
* insert new drive as /dev/sdd1
* dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdd1
* mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda1
* physically swap /dev/sda and /dev/sdd so /dev/sdd
* mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1

Is this the best approach?
Especially the dd?
I think I saw a 'better way' but can't find it despite some concerted 
googling.

Any suggestions gratefully recv'd.

David
PS yes I'm buying a hot spare.
Yes I wish I'd done that before but you have to balance risk and I 
didn't expect 2 new Maxtor drives to die within a few months of 
purchase. 1million hours MTBF - yeah, right.
Equally why should a two sets of bad blocks screw up my raid array. <sigh>
No, I don't have a backup of 1Tb of data - I'm a home user.