On Fri, 3 Jul 2015, Justin Stephenson wrote:

quoted

         State : active, degraded, Not Started

What does "cat /proc/mdstat" say? It looks like the array isn't up and 
running, in that case you have to assemble it and get it up and running 
before you can --add the new drive.

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

mdstat says the array is inactive. after a reboot, it also reports sdf1 
as sdf1[8](S).

I have tried assembling with --scan --force and by naming the drives 
sd{b,c,d,e,f,g,h}1 Neither method has worked.

- Justin