whoops, i apologize, i was blindly reading your reply about using mdadm --details, i got "mdadm: md device /dev/md0 does not appear to be active." so i ran "sudo modprobe md-mod" and then "cat /proc/mdstat" and recreated the RAID. now i am also looked at "damaged" under status "sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md3" comes back with:
/dev/md3:
Version : 00.90
Creation Time : Thu Jun 3 22:38:58 2010
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 1953511936 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
Used Dev Size : 1953511936 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 3
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Update Time : Thu Jun 3 22:39:02 2010
State : active, resyncing
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0
Rebuild Status : 0% complete
UUID : 139730f9:b046d070:bd9f1658:0a1d2015 (local to host dcerouter)
Events : 0.3
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1
1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1
so i'm making progress, i'm trying to read up on mdadm but i don't do well trying to read technical documents.
thank you jimbodude and typhoon_2099, i feel like i'm getting somewhere now