It's happened to all of us. You're left with an expensive pile of hardware and a database that is dead to the world. You've just experienced a disk failure. Disk failures are the bane of database administrators and system administrators everywhere. Starting with that, you should realize that failure is part of the disk drive specifications.
Failure is a predictable occurrence.
To make it worse, the probability of failure increases with the number of drives. Having said that, I should tell you that there are several things you can do to minimize the probability of a disk failure and to reduce the pain during recovery. Raise your Java development to the power of Ten.