I've never known RAID 5 to work on anything but SCSI.

IDE/ATA supports 0, 1, and 0+1.

I could be wrong, I'm sort of old school on this. 

Hey guys, thanks for the reply. To answer some questions here, the IDE controller card is just a standard PCI IDE Ultra DMA 100 two port (four device- two on each cable) controller card. I realize this isn't the best way to have a RAID set up but don't have the money for an actual RAID 5 controller card running all the hard drives on seperate channels. I'm running the RAID configuration through Disk Manager in the Computer Management snap-in inside the admin tools in Windows 2000 Server. It's been running fine for over two and half years like that, and then started having misc problems during reboots on Windows updates. I would have to start the server again in order to have the one drive initialize. Well then two weeks ago, ended up putting in some extra hours at my second job and never got around to copying things over to another pc so that I could start looking at it and the second drive crashed before I had the chance to do it. Right now, I've ran a dos based hard drive util that checks for errors and the one drive is coming up clean but the other drive is coming up with a couple of bad sectors. Being that I don't exactly know how the files get spanned across drives, I don't know if doing a software recovery will work if I can't get the drives going again. Normally I wouldn't mind blowing the whole thing up and starting over by setting up a new RAID but I've got pictures of my daughter from when she was a week and half old that I can't get back (another moronic move by not having those backed up). I hope that's a little bit more information. I've looking on google but most of the things i've been finding are places that do the recovery. I found a software tool called RAID Reconstructor and I'm running that right now. If found all four drives and is trying to recover as I speak. Time left 3 hours 10 minutes so I'll find out in a couple of hours if it'll work or not.

As far as I know, it's impossible to recover Data with 3rd party Software from a single Disk of an Array.

Since the Array is a Software controlled Array, the Software is fully responsible for Data recovery (which it should do automatically while running).
Technically (unless you've lost too many Drives), you should still be able to access all Information, while the Bad Drive should be automatically disabled.

Once an Array is gone (too many bad Disks), I think there's nothing you could do (the RAID is already the Backup solution, if that fails, the Data is toast). Professional recovery by a company is always possible to an extend, but very expensive.

I was referring to Striping, on any other RAID Mirror it's of course easy (basically apart from a Warning, the affected System should continue to operate without any problem).

Glad to hear you were able to recover most of the files.

This reminds me, it's time to backup an image of this machine to my 200GB external USB drive