so close yet so far or maybe that's just the way it is, I am dumb on it but gettin smarter. the 2 ide drives diff channels of course hda and hdc each w/3 partitions hda1 2 3 hdc1 2 3. I format hot add sda1 2 3 cat /proc/mdstat it's all there ...# mdadm /dev/md0 1 2 -f /dev/hdc1 2 3 (fail or fault hdc md automatically picks up sda from spare status and writes to it. it finishes mind you hdc is still under fail status and I reboot. when the sys comes back up, it does not pick up sda anymore but instead just runs -U on all 3 partitions I was under the impression that sda would be there either I missed a step somewhere or something strange going on thx, John Rose