I have an array of two disks /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 as a raid5 array /dev/md0 on top of which I run lvm and mount the whole lot as /home
This is strange... For an RAID-5 array you need 3 disks at least. You can not have RAID5 with just two disks.
Are you absolutely sure it was an RAID 5 array? If that's the case, the array was already in degraded mode..... It is not possible to recover data from an RAID5 array if you have just one disk. Therefore u need at least two disks...
