Thanks you Neil!! i am running debian sarge with 1.9 and kernel 2.6.8 I followed your instructions mdadm -S /dev/md2 # shutdown md2 and release hde1 mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/hde1 # add hde1 as a spare in md1 mdadm -G -n2 /dev/md1 # grow md1 to have two devices. and now wustl@A1:~$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 hdb1[0] hdg1[1] 244195904 blocks [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 hde1[1] hdc1[0] 244195904 blocks [2/2] [UU] Yay!!! Thank you very much. Mitchell - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html