RAID1 Pickle after disk failure

[netcetera]

I recently had the mis-fortune of a disk failure, luckily the disk was part of a RAID1 setup, so nothing was lost - yet...I should mention that I am mirroring /boot/, swap and / , and am using mdadm.

I had thought that I had setup grub correctlly to allow booting off of either disk, but did not test it - my bad. So when I replaced the drive - hda- I thought that the sytem would boot off of hdd and then go through the process of rebuilding the array with the new drive. But the system would not boot. I tried various things, BIOS settings, etc, but the Grub splash screen would not appear when I tried to boot off of hdd.

I swapped cables - and drive jumpers - so that my previous hdd was now hda and then sucessfully re-booted the system. So far so good. Not sure why the disk would boot as hda and not hdd - maybe a BIOS issue with my motherboard even though it does allow specifying IDE 0-4 as boot devices.

So I had the sytem up and running - in a RAID degraded state - and started woking on bringing the RAID 1 scenario back. I partioned the replacement drive, now hdd and all looked well. It didn't look like I could simply add the drive to the array as cat /proc/mdstat implied to me that the first disk in the array had failed and I was worried about copying the contents of the second drive - which mdadm thought was good - over the drive that actually had the good stuff on it. I tried various other things with mdadm, like stoopping and re-creating the raid devices, etc, but to no success - probably user eror.

So now I am not sure how to proceed.

cat /proc/mdstat yeilds this: