Comment 16 for bug 573477

ok, finished rebuilding it and ran "sudo mdadm --examine" on every device and partition. The info looks correct for:
/dev/sdb1
/dev/sdc1
/dev/sdd1
/dev/sde1

It reports "mdadm: No md superblock detected" for:

/dev/md0
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc
/dev/sdd
/dev/sde

So hopefully this means that no superblock is on the devices themselves, and only the partitions. (I think I must have made the mistake of adding /dev/sde rather than /dev/sde1 the very first time, which is probably what caused all this mess).