Can't make swap and stopping automount

[vtrac]

I just built a new system and have some weird problems using mdadm raid. I have three drives, each partitioned the same way - /dev/sdX1, /dev/sdX2, /dev/sdX3, and /dev/sdX4, where X is a, b, and c. sda1 and sdb1 are RAID1 with sdc3 as a hotspare. sda2, sdb2, and sdc2 are of type linux swap. sda3 and sdb3 are RAID1 with sdc3 as a hotspare. sda4, sdb4, and sdc5 are configured as RAID0. The RAID portion all workes fine, but I have two problems:

1. sdX2 can't be made into a swap. "mkswap /dev/sdX2" returns "Device or Resource busy", even though they're not mounted and aren't doing anything. So right now I have no swap (which is really no problem for now since I have 8GBs of RAM).

2. When I start gnome, sda3, sdb3, and sdc3 all automount and shows up as an icon on my desktop. Obviously this is no good as it should be handled as an /dev/mdX device for RAID1. I don't know why these partitions get automounted but not sdX1 or sdX4. Any ideas on how to stop this or what's going on?