Hi thank you for the offer. Sounds interesting. Feel free to message me / PM and we could setup a chat?

Well it seems I'm not able to PM you.

If you look under the Contact Info tab in my profile you'll see my webpage which has my email, chat service, and phone info.

Touting for business is normally frowned on, but that looks an interesting concept.

If you guys sort anything out it might to nice to get a post-back for the edification of other interested parties.

I ended up contacting http://freedatarecovery.us/, and they were extremely helpful! The live USB/ISO supplied is very useful enabling a level of safety for the user as you can boot up only with the drives that need recovery, isolate behind a firewall, and the recovery expert can work freely from remote.

The process took a while (and my particular circumstances required lots of technical back and forth), but eventually we were able to successfully temporarily transfer all of the data from the recovered degraded array onto temporary drives!

Stephen was a great help and I even sent a donation for the expertise and guidance.

I'm now moving to ZFS, zpool of mirrors.

1 members found this post helpful.

EDIT: seems like I already followed up above haha oops; but anyway below is how I feel today.
----

I've been meaning to follow up here for a long time. Last year (as per the previous post) S.Haran from FreeDataRecovery services reached out to me as he expressed an interest in attempting to help with recovery. The process took a few months because both of us were very busy and we would work on it with a leisurely attitude as there was no urgency. (I had already given up hope at the time... had nothing to lose.)

After numerous productive sessions, together we were able to successfully recover the data!

There was almost no data corruption (some files so far have demonstrated corruption but this may have been due to bit rot or other reasons unrelated to the recovery process).

I was highly impressed by the technical capability, knowledge, professionalism, and services that FreeDataRecovery provided. And literally, it was free! When it was all said and done and I had successfully migrated and verified the integrity of my data, I donated to the service. The amount I donated was generous given my own situation, but still way less than any average person would pay for "profession data recovery" (who don't even guarantee success!).

I would highly recommend Stephen, and the services provided: http://freedatarecovery.us/.