Recovering from Two Failed Drives in a Six-Drive Raid-5 Array

Over the weekend two drives failed on one of our development machines and I lost a lot of work. The machine has six 300gb drives in a raid 5 array. Our system administrator tells me that if only one drive failed it would be possible to recover. We've tried putting the drives in the freezer for a few hours with no luck. It sounds like sending the array off to a recovery specialist would be very costly and hit or miss. Any ideas?

If you've lost two drives then you've lost your data. The only recourse is to restore from backup if one exists or, as you stated, send the drives off to a data recovery company to try and recover the data.

Restore from backup...

Go to the bank and get your backup tapes because it's gonna be a long night. Also, ask for RAID6 with a hot spare next time.

This has happened to me twice, now I use RAID-6. This is common when after one drive fails, you attempt a restore and another one fails. Your best bet is to attempt a recovery of a bad drive to a blank one of equal or greater size then force it into the array. To restore to a blank drive just do a 'dd if=/dev/baddrive of=/dev/gooddrive bs=1024k conv=noerror,sync'. If there's a bad spot on the drive it will be replaced with zeros, but at least you get 99.99% of your data back.