Yup, that was my thought - having to recreate the array with everything in the exact same position as mdadm had them previously (which is why I was starting to think that the disk slot # was an issue).
I've so far tried creating a RAID5 device purposely degraded (as to leave disk 1 and 2 out and add them in as 4 and 5), but I am receiving a "RUN_ARRAY failed: Input/output error" which isn't too comforting. Here's what I ran:
Code:
sudo mdadm --create --assume-clean /dev/md2 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 missing /dev/sde3 missing /dev/sdg3
mdadm: /dev/sde3 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=728756224K mtime=Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
mdadm: /dev/sde3 appears to be part of a raid array:
level=raid5 devices=4 ctime=Tue Jan 8 19:07:39 2013
mdadm: /dev/sdg3 appears to be part of a raid array:
level=raid5 devices=4 ctime=Tue Jan 8 19:07:39 2013
Continue creating array? yes
mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata
mdadm: RUN_ARRAY failed: Input/output error