NV+ Disk Issues (support case 16862225)

OK, not quite ready to give up on this yet. The thing is I'm not so sure I do have two bad disks. From the best I can tell disk 3 definitely has some issues as the unit refuses to boot with this drive in there. However, the other suspect disk is disk 1 (or disk 0, depending on where you are looking) and it does not really show any signs of having hardware problems. The system boots up fine with it, there are no SMART errors reported, and the OS appears to be running off of a partition off this drive. This doesn't mean the drive is OK, but it certainly seems that way. Did I possibly (probably) do some harm by booting the unit without drive 3 in there? Maybe that is the case, but there seems like there could/should be some type of behind the scenes magic to somehow reset this "faulty" reading on the drive / partition.

If getting this thing to boot normally is going to be out of the question then I have two follow-ups:

1) What is the best / recommended way of checking the drives to see if they do have hardware problems?

2) Has anyone had any success with recovering data by putting the drive / drives in another system and using something like a live SystemRescueCD?

Thanks again,
John