On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, Neil Brown wrote:

1/ I think you are hitting and mdadm bug in "--assemble --force" that was
  fixed in 2.6.8. (git commit 4e9a6ff778cdc58dc).

Thanks, I'll try to upgrade mdadm.

3/ You really need to fix your problem with SATA timeouts or the array is
  never going to work.

Yeah, I swapped the PSU yesterday (to an Corsair single rail one) after 
this happened the first time, I thought that might be related. Obviously 
it wasn't, so I'm going to swap cables as next step.

4/ please (please please) don't use pastebin.  Just include the output inline
  in the mail message.  It is much easer to get at then.

Check, most of the important information was already in the email, I just 
added it as an extra... Will include it in the email next time.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se