raid0 initialization

[Harland Christofferson <debian-user@zerocrossings.com>]

this is my fist time installing raid0 on a machine that is not a 
new install. /dev/hda has gobs of good data i don't want to lose.
/dev/hdc is newly partitioned and formatted before installing the 
raid tools.

kernel version is 2.4.18-k7

i installed raidtools2 and mdadm.

i created a new file /etc/raidtab

raiddev /dev/md0
        raid-level      1
        nr-raid-disks   2
        nr-spare-disks  0
        persistent-superblock 1
        device          /dev/hda1
        raid-disk       0
        device          /dev/hdc1
        raid-disk       1


then, i tried
$# mkraid md0

which responded
$# device md0 is not described in the config file

i am reluctant to try
$# mkraid -f /dev/md0

the force flag just seems scary to me. 

any suggestions?