I completely agree with your statement regarding RAID0, unfortunately I inherited the system and issues. After the recovery has been completed the host will only be used as a lab environment, certainly not with RAID 0.
I will give a LiveCD a try however I am quite inexperienced with Linux environments in general and will likley be out of my depth.
Presumably I will still use the dd command replacing
dd if="/dev//disks/mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0" bs=1M conv=notrunc of=/vmfs/volumes/<OTHER-DATASTORE>/almost-dead.bin
with
dd if="/dev//disks/mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0" bs=1M conv=notrunc of=/<NetworkShare>/almost-dead.bin
