Server down-fail​ed RAID5-asking for some assistance

[John Valarti <mdadmuser@gmail.com>]

Hi there.
Please pardon my lack of experience and expertise here, as this is my
first time posting.

Where I work there is a fairly old fileserver.
It is running CentOS 4, kernel 2.6.9-100EL
Recently it failed and it tries to boot, but fails part way with:
RAID5: not enough operational device for md1 (2/4 failed).

This machine has data for a number of users, and, of course it seems
the backup has not been roperly done for a few months ( responsible
staff member left).
I am in the position of being teh only likely person with a chance of
recovering the data for a few users on this machine.
And I am certainly NOT an expert!

So, here is what I have done so far:
On further inspection, I disconnected the drives out one at a time and
determined which 2 are "failed".
I pulled those out, and on another machine ran Seagate Seatest for
Linux to test them.
They both came out as healthy, although one apparently has a lot of
uncommited bad sectors, or so the disk tool on a Fedora14 mchine tells
me.
I looked and see the layout is each of the 4 disks present have 2 partitions.
After testing I was able to see the partitions on each disk with fdisk.
I did not try to mount as these are simply RAID members, and I know
there is no complete filesystem to mount on any single drive here.

First partiton on each drive is small,  /boot, and it seems to be
RAID1 on all 4 drives.
Those are healthy enough to get partially into a boot.

The machine still boots to the point of trying to get access to / and
then kernel panics.
The / and other parts are on a RAID5 made from the second partiton of
the 4 disks.

I have returned all 4 disks to the machine, and using CentOS
install/recovery media, have teh machine up
in rescue mode.
At this point I believe that I need to rebuild the RAID5.

I understand that I probably only get one chance to do this right, so
I write here today
to beg some help with this.
 I do not lose other peoples data,

Can anyone make me a suggestion?


Thaks in advance for any help !



John Valarti - under a lot of pressure..