Need help with software RAID

[Patrick <patrickq@pangea.ca>]

Hi,

I would really like to use stable potato, 2.2.17, but I can't
get software raid working under debian for the life of me...

I originally created the raid devices a year or so ago, on redhat 6.?,
which
used their custom kernel 2.2.5-15, and can use them fine if i boot into
redhat or 
debian using that kernel.  


I compiled a couple of new kernels, 2.2.17, 2.2.18, and make sure raid
is enabled
but I get the same errors...

/etc/raidtab looks like:
raiddev /dev/md0
        raid-level      0
        nr-raid-disks   3
        persistent-superblock 1
        chunk-size     16
        device          /dev/hdc11
        raid-disk       0
        device          /dev/hde11
        raid-disk       1
        device          /dev/hdg11
        raid-disk       2

i'm using the raidtools2 package, I believe
raidstart --version:  raidstart v0.3d compiled for md raidtools-0.90

but raidstart -c /etc/raidtab /dev/md0 results in this error:
/dev/md0: Invalid argument

fdisk thinks the drives look like: 
/dev/hdc11         3188      3270     41800+  fd  Linux raid autodetect

but /var/log/kern.log says:
Dec 26 12:07:14 boz kernel: Oops ! md0 not running, giving up !
Dec 26 12:07:14 boz kernel: Bad md_map in ll_rw_block
Dec 26 12:07:14 boz kernel: EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock


and # cat /proc/mdstat:
Personalities : [2 raid0] [3 raid1]
read_ahead not set
md0 : inactive
md1 : inactive
md2 : inactive
md3 : inactive

I tried making new raid devices using mkraid, but that fails too...

thanks for any advice,
patrick.