I've spent a number of hours over the last week attempting to set up my new desktop with software RAID1. It's a Debian Sid install from a "fresh" daily image of the installer.

I managed to get the RAID1 set up using mdadm and things were working well for a couple of days. Yesterday, I installed a number of packages (I don't know if this had anything to do with it or not) and rebooted and upon reboot I was greeted with fsck failures on ALL of my RAID devices. The superblocks were all corrupted or "gone". It suggested that I run fs2ck (all of the block devices are ext3) to load an alternate superblock, but I received the same error again... corrupted or no superblock...

At that point I was left with no choice but to reinstall.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this happened? What could I have installed to "break" things? Does anyone know what I can do to prevent this?

I reinstalled but simply partitioned my second disk into a single partition and mounted it as /backup and I will either use a backup solution using it for now...
Right now, I don't trust software RAID1 to be stable enough for me to use everyday!!!!

Just a bit more information. Here is the exact error I received:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>