Ok so I looked through the examine data and it appears the order of the disks was: sde 0 - Z1E1AKPH sdc 1 - Z24091Q5 sdb 2 - Z1E1RPA9 sdd 3 - Z1E19E4K So I was going to try the first possible combination and assemble with sde/sdc/sdb/missing, this is what I tried: # export IMSM_NO_PLATFORM=1 # mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md/imsm /dev/sde /dev/sdc /dev/sdd missing --raid-devices 4 --metadata=imsm mdadm: /dev/sde appears to be part of a raid array: level=raid0 devices=0 ctime=Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 mdadm: metadata will over-write last partition on /dev/sde. mdadm: /dev/sdc appears to be part of a raid array: level=raid0 devices=0 ctime=Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 mdadm: metadata will over-write last partition on /dev/sdc. mdadm: /dev/sdd appears to be part of a raid array: level=container devices=0 ctime=Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 mdadm: metadata will over-write last partition on /dev/sdd. mdadm: size set to 1953511431K Continue creating array? y mdadm: This level does not support missing devices The example commands I found for creating imsm array were like this: mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md/imsm /dev/sde /dev/sdc /dev/sdd missing --raid-devices 4 --metadata=imsm mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md/Volume0 /dev/md/imsm --raid-devices 4 --level 5 Should I be defining level=5 when creating /dev/md/imsm also? Or should I only do it for imsm container and omit it from creating /dev/md/Volume0? thanks for everything so far I feel like I'm pretty close, once I can get the arrays up with missing and dont have to worry about overwriting anything then I'm sure I can work out the right combination of disks and hopefully the disks with no imsm metadata arent so damaged I cant recover chris On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Dan Williams <djbw@xxxxxx> wrote: > >> -- 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