How about recovering the files? how easy is it?
The ease of recovery depends to a large extent on the physical condition of the drive in question and, if there are two drives, how they were set up.
The easiest way to test is to put the drive in a USB caddy and connect it to your computer. Since the drive is formatted Ext3 you will need a file system driver for windows but not linux. If you can see the drive this way you can then copy the files as necessary.