I have a 3-disk RAID5, with a consistent superblock, and partitions are all 0xFD. The array isn't recognized by mdadm at boot or when I manually ask it to assemble /dev/md0 without specifying partitions. The three partitions are always /dev/sd[abc]1. Output of -D /dev/md0 is: /dev/md0: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Sun Jun 15 22:02:57 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 1465143808 (1397.27 GiB 1500.31 GB) Used Dev Size : 732571904 (698.64 GiB 750.15 GB) Raid Devices : 3 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Aug 26 01:03:31 2008 State : clean Active Devices : 3 Working Devices : 3 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K UUID : eaa2f834:729baa7b:5b2687e9:8461c801 Events : 0.512 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 -- 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