thanks for the reply, I actually made out ok after a really harrowing day. I googled and found a NAS Recovery program. Put an IDE controller in my computer which had only one IDE port (for the CDROM) because it is SATA type. at first it could not see any drives, so one at a time I plugged them in and found one of the drives actually loading them down. now it could see two, put the third one in freezer and that worked, now it could see 3 of them which is all you need to recover data from a 4-drive raid 5 array. The program worked like a champ. recovered all of the data. The NAS is toast, it's power supply is also bad under a load. picked up new NAS and transferred data, and everything is back to normal. Going to get one of those online backup services so next time everyone will not be panicking in the future.
Not sure if we are supposed to promote programs, so I left out those details, I found them googling and looking at reviews, program offed free trial download to see if it can find the files. Then I paid the $99 to get full functionality to actually save them to my hard drive. GeekSuad wanted over $1000 to recover the data which could take a week, i did it for $150 plus my time in half a day. Boss is very happy.
"I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, 'cause they are stuck on me"