On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 21:56:53 +0100 Michael Samer [off-list ref]
wrote:

Hello Mr Brown
you might remember helping me end of 2012 with an mdadm error 
(lost/inactive volume).
This year I've been proactive in advertising your name to our yearly 
donation list. My collegue Lisa Braunert should already have contacted 
you and booked 250EUR at your account. Hope this was/is an adequate 
donation for the two very helpful mails :-)

??? Sorry, don't know what you are talking about.
I'm not really interested in receiving donations.  If you have spare money,
please give it to a local children's charity.

Currently I've the a mdadm system here again with unmountable volume due 
to disk (timeout and badblocks) failures. I transfered the disk already 
to new HDs.

Question: for this is a RAID5 the only redundant disk was lost to a 
timeout sometime in the past and the second (/dev/sdf) had tons of 
BadBlocks in the first and last 5MBs. I reconstructed the partition 
table (as all 8 disks are build the same way), but how could I glue the 
mdadm system together again. After that I'd start an integrity check of 
the mdadm volume and afterwards an fsck.

I attach the "mdadm --examine /dev/sd*" so you might consider looking 
upon my problem

This is a very vague problem description.  I'm not really sure what you are
asking beyond "It doesn't work, please help"...

You mentioned RAID5 and there only seems be be one RAID5 in the mdadm
--examine output, on /dev/sd[aceh]3
It is an 8-disk RAID5, so 4 devices seem to be missing?
The "Update Time" is 21st April.  So this array has not been used for over 5
months???

I think you need to spell out in more detail what the problem is, what the
current state is, how it got that way, and what you hope to achieve.
Because at the moment I am lost.

NeilBrown