Problem booting poweredge 1950

Not sure if this is a RedHat problem or a Dell problem but I figured I'd start here.

What I've done so far:

1) Purchased and setup a very nice pe1950 and a MD1000(w 4TB)
2) Hooked up the MD1000
3) during boot went into the controller setup (ctrl-r)
- removed the Virtual drive on the 'i' controller (was raid1 of both disks, and I prefer to use software raid)
- made two virtual drives on 'i' controller, one for each physical disk
- switched to 'E' controller (F12)
- made eight virtual drives on the 'E' controller.
4) booted off cd rom and installed RedHat ES 4 update 4 (it correctly detected and installed the megaraid_sas driver)
5)
- made a 1024MB /boot and mirrored it on sda&sdb
- made a 2048MB swap and mirrored it on sda&sdb
- made a (rest) / and mirrored it on sda&sdb
- made a 3.3TB raid5 partition using the MD1000 disks
6) once install was done rebooted, and this is where things seem to fail. It doesn't look like the 1950 even tries to boot off the disk.
7) rebooting on cdrom and going into rescue mode, I can confirm all the partitions are there, and work (mount, they have all the right file etc...)
8) confirmed in the bios the raid is enabled, the boot order is cdrom (but there is no cd in the drive), and the hard drive c:, and under disk order it lists the 'i' controller as the first controler to try.

I'm stumped the Dell goes past loading the bios, and just sits there, never giving me any error, or any indication it even tried to boot off the drive, or which drive it might be using. Any ideas as to what I'm missing would be much appreciated.