LVM2 recover/resotre with a drive failure?

I created a 1 TB LVM2 with 2 Seagate 250 GB and 1 Western Digital 500
GB SATA drives. The two Seagate's have actually been in the LVM setup
for almost a year and I recently added the Western Digital because my
main computer apparently does not support 500 GB drives.

Anyways, I had some trouble with the WD drive to start with, it would
not spin up and just weird stuff. I was about to return it, but I got
it working, tested it and even ram smart tools on it, everything
checked out. I then added it to the LVM and everything was fine, until
last night. I could not access the LVM and when the computer rebooted,
it started reporting not being able to read the drive. So now, the
computer does not even detect it so I can't even run smart tools.

This has completely jacked up the LVM though and I can't do anything
with it. Is there a way to recover/restore the data on the two Seagate
drives? From my understanding, all the data resides on a drive and is
not spanned across all of them like RAID. I will be returning the WD
drive today for a new one, not sure if that will trick the LVM enough
to seeing that sdc is back for me to access the LVM?

I really would like to use the 500 GB to copy as much as I can from the
two 250 GB as I plan to order 3 more 250 GB or 320 GB from Seagate and
then get another 4 port SATA II card to run software RAID 5 instead for
the 1 disc failure tolerance.

Any help or information would be greatly appreciated!

.

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