[ale] Changing OS's on a pc with RAID

[runman at speedfactory.net (Greg)]

I currently have a fileserver running RH 7.3 and my files are on a RAID 5
group of hard drives (3) using software RAID and the OS is on a separate 4G
disk.  I set up the hard drives using raidtools.  I also have 2 other disks
in the fileserver.  What I want to do is install Debian on the box since I
can no longer expect RH to support it and I abhor upgrades.  So my question
is thus:

Is it possible, if I wipe out RH and install Debian and mdadm, to
re-construct the RAID 5 partition without any loss of data ? and what about
the current order of the hard drives, does that matter ? (I am guessing no,
since the parity bit is spread all over all 3 drives).

TIA,

Greg