Mdadm -- Restoring an array

I have a server with one drive that has the boot and system on it and a
RAID5 device managed by mdadm. The RAID is made up of 3 hard drives
with a 4th spare also hooked up.

The system drive crashed and I restored it. The problem is in the past,
when I've tried to restore a RAID, I've had trouble with it. The man
page for mdadm makes it look like a RAID can be reassembled with just
a --assemble option given on the command line, but it keeps asking for
more information. I thought there was a scan mode, to tell mdadm to
scan local drives and re-assemble an existing RAID. I've tried
different options previously to restore a mdadm RAID, but had trouble.

There is no data on this drive that can't be reconstructed, but to do so
would be a bit of a pain and take time (and the backup system for this
RAID was still experimental).

Does anyone have experience rebuilding a mdadm RAID when the config info
has been wiped out? (I wouldn't think that would matter, since the
mdadm config files that should have held the RAID info always seemed to
be empty on my systems.)

Thanks for any help on this. It would be a lot easier to restore it
with a single command than to rebuild the data.

Hal


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