NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello, all - this appears to be an impressively knowledgable body and I hope someone here has some words of wisdom. I'm holding out hope that at least a couple of you have upgraded from Rebytes in the past and might be able to help me (somehow).

FIRST, THE PROBLEM:

I built a Rebyte in 2004 around a PIII/600, a Promise IDE card and four server-grade 300GB Maxtors in RAID 5. And it's behaved rather well since. However, opening and copying some photos on Saturday (beware Canon's Imagebrowser software!) caused the Rebyte to cough up some write errors. I checked on it - it's under the house connected to a UPS - and it was angry about files, I believe. So I cycled power on it (the only way to get it to see reason).

Well, it woke up wanting to see a floppy. So a day's worth of experimentation revealed that whatever else was going on with the Rebyte, the PIII motherboard (a Tyan) had fried its BIOS sometime between February and now. So I installed a shiny new Intel motherboard and Celeron 2.8GHz because, I figured, if the BIOS fried once it's just a matter of time before it fries again.

Power everything back up, it sees all four drives, the Rebyte kicks on, and we get to this:

""raid5: failed to run raid set md0
md: pers->run(failed)...
do_md_run() returned -22
...
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-3, errno - 2
VFS: Cannot open root device "303" or 03:03
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:03"

THE FIRST QUESTION:

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to rescue my 700+GB of personally-authored Final Cut documents, Logic Audio documents and personally-taken photographs? I built a RAID array because I wanted my stuff to be safe... and the drives are fine, it's the &*%# controller that cooked. Again, software RAID 5, LILO linux booter, thing runs on a Delkin IDE flash card. I'm a Mac guy, used to be a PC guy, and haven't ever even played a linux guy on TV. I did the Rebyte thing because I knew I'd hose up a Red Hat install something fierce. And while I'd love some of the people at Rebyte to return my calls and emails, they've been pretty hard core abandonware for about two years now, I think.

THE SECOND QUESTION:

Once I get the data off these drives (or not), I'll be left with four healthy IDE drives, a brand shiny new Intel DG965SS mainboard, a gig of ram, and a 2.8 GHz celeron. I'd love to build up an NL2-USB; recommendations as to RAID cards (still fond of RAID5)?

What I intend to do once I'm on the other side of this whole mess is build up TWO identical RAID arrays and park one in Seattle and the other in Los Angeles. One's on Comcast, the other would be on Cox. I'd like to have them compare notes and mirror every Sunday at 2am or something. Anyone have any suggestions as to how to make this whole shebang work?

Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.

Setht:

I am no expert on RAID and have never used it. But I was looking for (non-RAID) data recovery software and remembered your post.

No guarantees ... and use at your own risk ... but here's what I ran across: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Haven't tried it yet, but looks like it can also handle RAID5.

Hope that can help. Good luck.

Georg

Boy, I hope you're right. I think I'll get some good sysadmin-type buddies to take a gander at that and hope for the best... Thanks for the tip.