BleepingComputer.com: RAID 5 Failed, Review My Plan to Rebuild?

What happened
On our Windows 2000 Server, 1 of the 3 hard drives failed.

Equipment on Server
RAID controller - 3ware - Escalade 9500s-LP
Hard Drives Currently Installed in the RAID - Western Digital Caviar WD200 - 200gb

What do I need to do
I bought 3 all new Western Digital Blue WD5000AAKS - 500gb hard drives. I need to install all 3 of these new hard drives in the Windows 2000 Server.

A Little About the Server's Operations
The server operates live websites and has many clients logging into it on a constant basis. It is not a new server, in fact it is quite old.

So What is the Plan?
Ok, so after many hours/days of research I figured out that the RAID controller is possibly a hot-swappable controller so at first I thought this was going to be easy... until I inspected the hard drives. All the hard drives are using MOLEX power connectors, which makes them NOT hot swappable.
Ok, so hot swappable out of the equation. So, realizing that the hard drives that are still working in the RAID setup are more than 8 years old and I can hear another one of the working hard drives being a little louder than the other, I opted into getting 3 all new drives to replace the 3 old ones in the server.
The plan here is, take an image of the 1st working hard drive, with the operating system on it, and copy it to 1 500gb hard drive and install the 3 new 500gb hard drives and rebuild the RAID. However, I do not FULLY understand RAID 5, so I have a few questions.

1. Is this plan accomplishable?

2. If I want to replace the 3 old hard drives with the 3 new hard drives, do I have to copy BOTH of the old working hard drives that are left to get 100% of the data back, or can I do like I had planned and just copy the main 1 and it will rebuild fine?

3. Does anyone see a flaw in my plan?

4. I plan on using Clonezilla to copy the drive, will this work copying a 200gb hard drive to a newer 500gb hard drive and will it work on the RAID 5?

5. How do I go about plugging in the new hard drives once I have copied the image, do I plug in 1 at a time, or all 3 and pray it finds the right one to start the RAID?

6. Is there anymore information that I have missed or need on this post?


Thank you in advance guys/gals!

If you are using raid 5 with three drives you can only have one array. You might have multiple partitions on that array but in essence the raid controller sees it as one big chunk. What you will have to do is perform a full backup of the existing partitions. Then shut down the server, replace the drives with te new ones. In the card utility create the raid 5 array. Then you will need to reinstall tbe base OS, create the data partiton, and restore all of the data from the back ups.

Unfortunately you can not copy the information to one of the drives because when you hook them up to the controller and make the array it will wipe out the disks.