Linux – Must partprobe before using drive

i tried to re-create the raid with --assume-clean but this did not work.

This is what you should do. What do you mean by "did not work"? What's the message? What happened? Did you called mdadm with ALL of the original RAID array partitions?

what could i do to recover my data?

Restore from backup. If you have no backup, that's a well-deserved lesson (this is harsh and not intended to be a joke at all).

edit : given that this is an encrypted volume, you have absolutely zero chance to restore any data if you can't get the RAID correctly working. Can you post just the /proc/mdstat content? I don't understand what's the current state (your message states 2 failed drives, but only 1 failed drive is represented).

That behavior (using a spare) should really be invisible to you; what it's saying there is that it's going to do some drive building trickery, and instead of sweeping the disks and building the parity channel up during the build (slow!), it's going to build the array on three devices and throw the last device in after the fact, to do the parity build in the background.

Your suspicion about the problem with the command as you have it is dead on. If you run that, it'll generate a 3-disk array on 2 disks, then add the third disk from being the temporary hot-spare into the array.. leaving you with, still, a hot spare at the end of it.

You'll want this, instead; mdadm will still do its trickery with the hot-spare, but it'll be invisible to you (you'll see in /proc/mdstat after the creation, that it'll immediately jump into the process of loading data onto the 4th disk):

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1