I'm having some trouble rebuilding my raid 5 array with 5 x 500GB hard drives.

I come home the other day and discovered that my file server had crashed. It ended up being the motherboard, so I took the MB from my desktop and started going. I took this opportunity to upgrade to OpenSUSE 11, since the OS sits on a separate hard drive from the RAID array.

To give you an idea of my setup, I have a SIL24 SATA controller with a Adaptec SATA port multiplier. All of this runs into a 5-drive hot-swap bay.

I installed SUSE 11 on a new hard drive and booted up. I tried reassembling the array using the partition manager, but it could not detect the filesystem type. I ran various commands and it seems that every command returned something about the superblocks.

I then decided to run a mdadm --create --raid-level=5 --devices=5 /dev/sda1 .... etc command. Now when I try to mount the /dev/md0 device it says the fs is ext4.

The partitions are still there on each drive (Fd, Linux raid autodetect), and all I want to do at this point is get the array running so that I can get the over 1TB of data off.

Any help is appreciated.

The --create options for mdadm will blow away your existing array, essentially destroying all reference to your existing data. You can't mount the filesystem because it doesn't exist anymore.