6 drives (out of 7) and 1 spare

My raid 5 array is down and I'm trying to figure out why. Here's what I see:

  # mdadm -S /dev/md0
  # mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/hdm4 /dev/hdg2 /dev/hdf2 /dev/hdh2 /dev/hdo2 /dev/hde2 /dev/hdp2
  mdadm: /dev/dm0 has been started with 6 drives (out of 7) and 1 spare
  # 

What does "6 drives (out of 7) and 1 spare" mean? Is that what I should expect from a healthy array? The reiserfs superblock is gone, so I suspect that this message from mdadm should be telling me something, but I can't figure out what.

Can I go ahead and tell fsck.reiserfs to re-create a superblock in this state? Or should I do something else to my array to get it running healthy?

Thanks,
Dave