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 [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted