all, I have a 13 disk raid 5 set with 4 disks marks as "clean" and the rest marked as dirty. When I do the following command to start the raid set (md0) I get an error. Any ideas on how to recover? This is a debian sarge system running kernel 2.6.8-1-686-smp and mdadm version v1.4.0 - 29 Oct 2003 Thanks Jim # mdadm --assemble --scan mdadm: /dev/md0 assembled from 6 drives and 1 spare - not enough to start the array. my /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf looks like DEVICE partitions ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=12 UUID=c9669a6b:cdc5b9d4:1df0802c:86d53e17 and /proc/mdstat looks like Personalities : [raid5] md0 : inactive sdb1[0] sdm1[12] sdn1[11] sdl1[10] sdk1[9] sdj1[8] sdi1[7] sdh1[6] sdg1[5] sdf1[4] sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] 3173710592 blocks unused devices: <none> - 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