I have this 3 disk raid5 volumne on an Asus motherboard sporting an Intel Rapid Storage chipset. The problem began when I noticed in windows that one of the hard disks (the first one in the array) was marked as failed in the Intel raid utility. I shutdown the system to remove the hard disk and removed the cables for the faulty hard disk. But I made a mistake and remove the cables for one of the working hard disks. So when I booted, it showed the raid volume as failed. I quickly shutdown the system and corrected the mistake. But it completely hosed my raid volume. When I booted the system up again, both of the remaining 2 hard disks were showed as offline. I read the raid recovery section in the wiki and installed ubuntu 12.04 on a separate non-raid hard disk (after completely disconnecting the offline raid5 volume). Then I reconnected the 2 hard disks and booted ubuntu. Then I gave the following commands: 1) mdadm --examine /dev/sd[bc] > raid.status 2) mdadm --create --assume-clean -c 128 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/md1 missing /dev/sdb /dev/sdc It gave the following output: mdadm: /dev/sdb appears to be part of a raid array: level=container devices=0 ctime=Thu Jan 1 05:00:00 1970 mdadm: /dev/sdc appears to be part of a raid array: level=container devices=0 ctime=Thu Jan 1 05:00:00 1970 Continue creating array? y mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata mdadm: array /dev/md1 started. But the raid volume is not accessible. mdadm --examine /dev/md1 gives: mdadm: No md superblock detected on /dev/md1. Worse, upon booting the system, the raid chipset message says the 2 hard disk are non-raid hard disks. Have I completely messed up the raid volume? Is it not recoverable at all? Thanks. -- 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