I work at a data recovery company (www.data-medics.com) and was recently contacted regarding recovering data from a failed EMC Clariion AX4-5i unit.  Here's the situation:

The OS drives are still in a healthy working array.  The data portion was configured in a RAID 6 with 8 500GB SATA drives.  One drive went offline and went unnoticed for a long time.  A second drive went offline (and was noticed), then during the rebuild, a third drive went down.  The latter two drives to go offline were both just affected by bad sectors and were imaged with only a few KB of unread sectors.  So we have more than enough disks to go online.

So here's my questions:

1. Is there a way to force the data array back online using the disks?  Even changing serial numbers of the clones isn't a problem, we're a professional data recovery lab and can do that in a few minutes.  But, I assume some metadata needs to be modified to un-mark the members from being "failed".

2. We can virtually build the array, however it doesn't appear there's any known file system on there.  I assume it's EMC's proprietary FLARE filesystem.  Is there any way that we can extract files that way, assuming that we can destripe the data from the array to a single image file?

3. Is there even a file system on the data array, or is it all on the OS part of the unit?

We deal with a ton of RAID arrays, but these EMC units are pretty foreign to us.

Thanks a million in advance for any guidance you can provide here.