This is very much dependent on the controller (or software) and its behavior. In general, you can pull the failed drive and the replacement drive, insert a new one, and have it rebuild the array.
It does this by calculating parity from the healthy drives, then rebuilding the data on the last. E.g. if you have a 4-drive RAID 5, you have one failed drive, 3 healthy. If you have a 5th drive in that's replacing #4, you can pull 4 and 5.. as long as 3 of the original 4 stay healthy and online.
However, some controllers are quirky. They can have bugs and other issues that complicate it.
If this is a hardware RAID, I'd strongly recommend calling manufacturer support to confirm. They may have some special procedure they want done.
By "replaced it with the wrong drive", did you mean you accidentally swapped out a good drive instead of the failed one? Or did you mean that you swapped out the failed drive with a replacement that you didn't intend to use? – Moses – 2015-10-16T01:16:40.890
no I pulled the failed drive and replaced it with one I didn't intend to use... Slaps me with a salmon – SteveL – 2015-10-16T01:29:41.650
In that case, my answer should apply then. Had you pulled a good drive, you'd be in a sticky situation. – Moses – 2015-10-16T01:41:00.257
have you heard of anyone pulling a drive from a rebuilding raid5 ? – SteveL – 2015-10-16T02:22:14.057