mdadm raid 5 won't reactive after fault

[japettyjohn]

I have a raid 5 array with 8 drives. One drive died and the machine was restarted. The dead drive is not recognizable in bios or anything so that was replaced. The 7 other drives all have their superblock in place but when I try to reassemble it says there is not enough disks to do so and creates the md file in an inactive state with those drives.

I do not have the conf as somehow the person who started this got the OS on this raid so I"m doing this from a live disk.

I see suggestions to create the raid again with a missing drive and then add the spare drive I have in so it will recreate, no data loss. Not sure if that's a better choice then assemble with force or not. It's about 7TB so I'd prefer not to go the wrong route.

Thanks in advance,
James

[Lazydog]

Have you run and raid commands on this raid yet? Like the one to remove the drive from the raid and then after replacing the drive the one to re-add the new drive?

Have a look HERE