A rising tech startup suffered a severe blow when its RAID 5 array crashed, rendering...

Option D is the best answer because a RAID 5 array can typically tolerate the failure of only one drive . In this scenario, two of the four drives are severely damaged , which means the array cannot be reconstructed normally from the remaining disks alone. Since the lost data is critical and the controller is unavailable, the immediate priority is to recover as much physical disk data as possible from the damaged members through specialized hardware recovery .

Option A might be appropriate only if enough readable disks remained to reconstruct the array manually. Option C is also unlikely to succeed when two required disks are severely damaged and no configuration data is available. Option B is too limited because carving individual surviving disks separately does not restore the RAID’s logical structure or parity-dependent data layout.

From a CHFI perspective, RAID recovery decisions depend on the type of RAID, number of failed disks, and whether sufficient components remain for logical reconstruction. Because this RAID 5 has exceeded its normal fault tolerance, the most appropriate course is to send the damaged drives for professional hardware recovery before attempting further reconstruction.