Ouch

So here's a stumper. At work here we're sunning a pretty beefy system with two unfortunately small hard drives hardware raided together. The box is running Redhat 9. We got 2 more drives to add to the system because we were low on storage and lo and behold if adding them to the raid array didn't crap out the whole system. It crapped out at login. then it crapped out durring install. then it crapped out from the /bin/sh login. Then the boot device vanished.

I can't make heads nor tails of it nor can the other two (possibly three, I didn't catch her name) linux geeks that were here. Anyone have a similar experience or know what the hell happened? Anyone who was here care to add some technical details for me? Because I'm too fried right now to remember my name straight.