I'm going to setup a Linux PC so I can pull my unraid disks and try to recover whatever I can.  Any recommendations for a specific Linux distro that might be the best for this purpose?  I was just going to go with Ubuntu but if anyone has a better suggestion I'd appreciate it.

A trial installation of unraid would be easier since you don't have to install it to a hard drive, just assign all disks as data disks, be very careful not to assign anything to the parity slots. Or, a standard linux mint install media has a live mode, but you would probably need to mount the disks manually.

 

Maybe a more thorough explanation of what happened to your unraid install that necessitates a recovery might get better suggestions.

OK, I made a thread explaining the overall situation: