I have never seen five drives fail simultaneously.  It seems more likely
that you have a controller problem.  All RAID controllers I have worked
with come with diagnostics tools which can be run while the operating
system is down.  If you have these, you might want to see if the
controller is reporting a specific problem with itself or with the array
data.

-Greg MacKinnon
CIT Client Services

Corey Gilmore wrote:
> I have a (scsi) RAID5 array with 6 disks in it, and suddenly 5/6 of the
> disks have fault lights on.  I just want to dump the data off of the RAID
> asap, but I'm not quite sure the best route to take.  Currently the 5 bad
> drives are marked offline by the controller - if I force them online, is
> it likely I will be able to access the data?  Or do fault lights typically
> indicate a physical failure of the drives?
>
> Anyone have any experience with a similar situation?
>
> Thanks,
> corey