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Problem while reassebling raid using mdadm

Help.

I have been using mdadm raid5 array on my old ubuntu for over 5 years withount problem. Then I decided to reinstall.

Now, I got new fresh clean install of Ubuntu (lucid lynx) and did commands

Code:

sudo apt-get install mdadm

sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

which failed with (as far as I remember)

Code:

/dev/sda device or resource busy

/dev/sdb seems to be part of raid ...

/dev/sdc seems to be part of raid ...

/dev/sdd seems to be part of raid ...

Then I went to google for solution. After some time, I tried that command again but I have got somthing like

Code:

/dev/sda is too small. 0K

/dev/sdb device or resource busy

/dev/sdc seems to be part of raid ...

/dev/sdd seems to be part of raid ...

sda is now _empty_ and sdb busy now? I got feeling something is messing with my disk, finished with first one and now it is destroying my second one. I kicked power cord out of my computer, disconnected these 4 disks and now I am seeking for profesional help.

How did you partition the drives during the install phase? And, what doesfdisk -l /dev/sdX1 on each drive show?

Update:

Problem "solved".
After talking to my more experienced friend, I exhumed my old system to find the raid volume is completely ok. What a relief. Then I uninstalled dmraid on my new system (which got somewhat automatically installed and maybe caused all that) and copied mdadm.config from the old system. That was enough to make the raid volume work. I still don't know what caused what happened to me before, but now everything works fine and you can mark this thread as "solved".