Inherited Dell 1900 and Windows Home Server

Have you created and initialised the virtual disk in the raid card bios, once this is done it should load ok as the install disk has the drivers built.

Are you installing WHS 2008 or 2011?  

Keep in mind that the PERC does not support non-RAID, so unless you configure RAID BEFORE booting to the OS installation disk, the OS won't be able to see the hard drives even if you have the right drivers.

Go to CTRL-R during POST to configure AND initialize RAID.

It's WHS 2011 and the RAID was already initialized at 100% per the boot up.  However, I went ahead and removed the old one and started a new one.  I initialized the RAID-5 set up that I configured and still no joy on the WHS install.

Try this page for a driver the win7 x64 or 2008r2 x64 may work.

Both Windows 7x64 and 2008R2 should have the drivers built-in, so Dell does not have special drivers for this hardware/software combination; assuming RAID has been configured/initialized, it should just work.  Drivers often have a minimum supported firmware level, and even though the PERC 5/6 use the same drivers, the support is based on firmware level.  Because we are talking about a PERC 5 instead of the PERC 6, it may be even more sensitive to the firmware on the card.  The only other thing I could suggest is upgrading your PERC 5 firmware to the latest.  It is possible that even this is not high enough, that the built-in driver (or even third-party driver) needs a higher firmware for compatibility than even the latest PERC 5 firmware has.  If it doesn't work with the PERC 5 at the latest firmware, I "might" go so far as to say that the PERC 5 is not supported and you would need a PERC 6/i to get it to work.  One other option with the PERC 5 might be to try an older version (use Other Versions link on download page) of a Vistax64 or 2008x64 driver.  I'm afraid that's all I have left - a quick Google search did not yield a successful installation that I saw.

Any other suggestions on this?

The serial is:[ADMIN NOTE: Service Tag removed per privacy policy] and the model is ecm01 if that helps.

It shouldn't affect the ability to install the OS (just the ability to use the full storage), but is your raid virtual disk over 2048GB (2TB) in size?

Been thinking about this for a bit and know people have installed WHS2011 onto varying sized disks. At least 60gb is required for the C: boot partition and the pre req for home server is a 160gb disk as the remaining space is formatted as the D: for shares and data. This article describes using other sized disks. usingwindowshomeserver.com/.../installing-whs-2011-or-sbs-2011-essentials-on-ssd-or-sata-hard-drives-smaller-than-160gb

I would suggest deleting your VD's and create a new virtual disk and choose a small size of 100gb or so and initialise it. leave the rest of the space unallocated for now. Follow the article and see if installs, you can then install server manager and configure the rest of the storgage using storage management tool.