When I try to assemble a raid array in mirrored mode it fails giving me this:

mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sda2
mdadm: /dev/sda2 has no superblock - assembly aborted

I have this problem only with mirrored and not striped. I even recreated some partitions as striped and now they work. What's odd is that if I boot the slackware CD and issue the build command they mount perfectly. I can see the contents of the partition. In other words, without the build command mirrored partitions don't mount.

I think I fixed that issue by using --create, but I'm not sure and it's not booting anyway.

Though when I boot my install it gave my a kernel panic error before, but now it interrupts the boot process and prompts for the root password and suggests doing fsck. Though I've tried what it suggests, fsck.ext3 -v -y /dev/md1 and fsck.ext3 -b 8193 and it still won't boot.

When I do: fsck.ext3 -b 32768 /dev/sda3 or md2, it goes through a routine where it fixes a bunch on inodes and directories, but it still won't boot.

I have tried reinstalling slackware and reformatting/reinstalling the file system using setup and still it gives me the same errors. I really doubt it's a hardware fault as my windows partition works fine. How can I manually write a superblock(using fsck or mdadm?) to the hard drive? Or is there something else I can do?

Here's EXACTLY what it says when it interrupts the boot process:

If I press ctrl D then the system reboots.

If I do mdadm --examine /dev/<dev> the output looks normal.

Maybe this has something to do with it. When I created the partitions, I created them on /dev/sda and /dev/sdb but since I have a PCIe x1 sata controller, when I boot the system sda and sdb become sdc and sdd. While the hard drives on the sata controller take up sda and sdb. However, when I remove the sata controller I get the same results.

I really don't want to reformat and it didn't do me a lot of good before anyway. I've tried rewriting the partition table with fdisk and doing different things with fsck but I don't know if I did the fsck correctly. I did fsck.ext3 -fcv /dev/<dev> as well as what it said above.

The only thing I can think of is writing zeros to both hard drives with dd then reformatting again. But then I would have to kill my working windows partitions and back up all the crap that's on there and I don't really want to do that.

OH OH... It just popped into my mind. How did this all start? Well, chkdsk happened. Thank you M$ For whatever reason windows wanted me to do chkdsk and rather than using common sense and stop, I went along with the carpet bombing command that is chkdsk which hosed my boot sector forcing me to reinstall lilo. What I don't get is how is knackered the superblock so that even when rewriting it with linux commands doesn't help.