Apple-Installed RAID Failure

When I bought my G5, I ordered it with the dual 250 GB SATA drives in a raid to create a 500 GB drive. Today, it appears that the RAID has failed and the computer will not boot properly. Well, rather it starts up, is fine for about 5 minutes, and then everything shuts down.
Using disk utility while booting from the (apparently) damaged drive does not reveal any errors because the drives seem to work fine until the crash. However, I installed 10.4.6 on an external drive, and while the RAID is recognized for about a minute after startup, it just quits and I get the device removal warning. After the RAID quits, running disk utility reveals that one of the disks has "Failed" and the other is "Offline."
I have tried resetting the PRAM and starting up in Safe Mode, but neither succeeded in solving the problem. Is it possible to correct the error without losing data? Is there a way of at least stabilizing it long enough so that I can retrieve important data (because like an idiot, I didn't backup)?

Well I went into an Apple Store, and the only advice that they were able to give me was to try Prosoft's Data Rescue II, although none of the Geniuses had ever used it so they really didn't know if it would work.
As it turns out, if the controller is stable enough, Data Rescue can actually recover data from it. So I got myself a 500 GB external hard drive and ran drive clone (which simply copies the data from one drive to another) and the program didn't show any errors! There is the slight problem that the 500 GB drive that I got was about 1.4 gigs short of the internals, but I'll be pretty darn happy if I can keep 99.6% of my data!
Unfortunately the clone drive isn't mounting, but I assume that's either because the drive was not formatted, or because of that missing 1.4 GB. However, I do have a large internal drive that I can restore to from the clone drive, so I'm hoping everything will work out.

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    This is another Kludge that works on Windows 7
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    VDS_HEALTH enumeration value that specifies the health state of the volume.
    TransitionState - A
    VDS_TRANSITION_STATE enumeration value that specifies the transition state of the volume.
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