Neil Cavan wrote:

Thanks for taking a look, David.

No problem.

Kernel:
2.6.15-27-k7, stock for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

mdadm:
mdadm - v1.12.0 - 14 June 2005

OK - fairly old then. Not really worth trying to figure out why hdc got re-added
when things had gone wrong.

You're right, earlier in /var/log/messages there's a notice that hdg
dropped, I missed it before. I use mdadm --monitor, but I recently
changed the target email address - I guess it didn't take properly.

As for replacing hdc, thanks for the diagnosis but it won't help: the
drive is actually fine, as is hdg. I've replaced hdc before, only to
have the brand new hdc show the same behaviour, and SMART says the
drive is A-OK. There's something flaky about these PCI IDE
controllers. I think it's new system time.

Any excuse eh? :)

Reiserfs recovery-wise: any suggestions? A simple fsck doesn't find a
file system superblock. Is --rebuild-sb the way to go here?

No idea, sorry. I only ever tried Reiser once and it failed. It was very hard to
get recovered so I swapped back to XFS.

Good luck on the fscking

David