moving software raid set from one system to another

[Dan Bongert]

So, I had a system partition fail the other day, and ended up needing to
completely reinstall my home server. I had a data drive was a software raid
set consisting of two 120GB hard drives striped together. After making sure
everything was up and running, I tried remounting the data partition. I added
its configuration to/etc/raidtab, and ran 
	raidstart /dev/md6
(raid devices 0 through 5 are the new system mirrors on my server). However
this got me an error message:
	/dev/md6: Invalid argument

Any thoughts? mkraid will wipe the disks, which is exactly what I don't want.
I ran across a tool called mdadm, but when I use that in examine mode, I get
this:

navi(52) ~/mdadm-1.5.0> sudo mdadm -E /dev/hde1
mdadm: No super block found on /dev/hde1 (Expected magic a92b4efc, got
c59ec5e0) navi(53) ~/mdadm-1.5.0> sudo mdadm -E /dev/hdf1
mdadm: No super block found on /dev/hdf1 (Expected magic a92b4efc, got
632b70d8

I *know* the drives were working properly, though for the life of me I can't
remember why I didn't create them with a persistent superblock. (I think this
is why mdadm is failing).

-- 
Dan Bongert                     dbongert at ssc.wisc.edu