"Above and beyond that, are we hosed no matter what I try?" No.  It can make a difference, but you have to ask yourself ... is a 2-month old backup good enough?  If not, then you need to call Data Recovery right now, as anything further you do without knowing exactly what happened, can make even data recovery that much riskier. "We believe they failed in close proximity (temporally) to each other." That may be, but with only one disk showing you any options, it doesn't much matter.  However, if disk 4 failed first, then there is a very good possibility of corruption from forcing online disk 4.  So, you could go through all the steps of finding out which drive failed first, but if disk 2 was that most recent disk in the array and you don't have the option to force it online, then you really don't have any option besides data recovery are rebuilding/restoring from backup, as forcing online a disk that is even seconds out of sync can cause significant damage.  However, if disk 4 was the last one to fail, then you can probably (assuming it is not physically faulty itself) just force it online and be on your way (well, on your way to getting a current backup, updating system firmware, and testing the drives for potential replacement). To answer your question ... yes, you can take the disks from one server to another, but you won't have any better luck on the other system.  You are much better off forcing online the "right" drive than attempting a retag (deleting the config an reconfiguring without initializing the array). To figure out which disk died first, you will need to take a look at the hardware/ESM logs and/or look at the controller logs, which you will only be able to pull from an OMSA Live CD.
Hello - we have a PE 2850 running RAID 5 with five 75 GB drives. It will not boot and is saying that disks 2 and 4 have failed. When I hit Ctrl M to enter the config, it shows disk 2 is failed and gives me no options while disk 4 also shows as failed but gives me options to Force Online, Rebuild, etc. The lights on each drive are blinking amber. We believe they failed in close proximity (temporally) to each other. We also have an identical PE 2850 and I inserted the drives in the same order into that machine to see if it is maybe the controller itself that is having problems. It would get to the point where it shows all 5 drives as online with green lights but merely prompts to go into config - still will not boot. My question is: Can I remove the drives from server #2, wipe the RAID config, insert the drives, and reconfigure the RAID array without losing the data? Above and beyond that, are we hosed no matter what I try? We do have back-ups but they are only current as of two months ago (I know, tisk tisk, but that's what we have). Thanks for any help you can offer!
PE 2850 RAID 5 failure