mdadm --examine only makes sense on a component of an md/raid array, not on the whole array itself. So the "mdadm --examine" errors you were getting were user errors :-) Everything looks fine except for the "total devices" "working devices" "active devices" totals, and they aren't used much. You can probably fix them with: mdadm --stop /dev/md1 mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 --update=summaries /dev/sd[abcd]3 but before you do that: Why do you say the raid5 partition is corrupted? What are the symptoms that caused you to start looking into this? NeilBrown - 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