Learning about DD servers (Windows Server?)

Hello all, I have been tasked with trying to repurpose DD140 servers by possibly putting Windows Storage Server & Foundation 2012 onto them and have been trying to figure these things out.  As there is little documentation that I have found, I can only guess that there are proprietary controls and configurations, appearing to be based on Linux and so I have hit some roadblocks trying to simply throw Windows Server on them and getting a RAID array going.

So the previous owners had a BIOS and OS password/login that were not provided to us.  No biggy, I've reset the CMOS and reformatted.  To my behest, it appears that with the stock firmware, the Marvell 88SE64xx controller while capable of hardware RAID, is only configured for software RAID.  Okay, so I finally get some drivers that work with Server 2012 and use the RAID Manager by Marvell and successfully get a software RAID array going.  Great!  So now the higherups want me to play with it and combine all nine HDD's into this one and make a large RAID array.  Success!  Reboot to see if there's a way to boot to a DOS environment and use the Marvell CLI RAID Manager... greeted with a message that the checksum of the inserted drives does not match previous configuration with no possibility of continuing to boot nor a way to change the checksum.. okay, so I reset CMOS again.  Still getting the message... arrrrr!  Is this by design?  My big questions are:

• Is it possible to include the system drive in the RAID array?
• Can I get more than 3 HDD's working unfettered?
• Is there a hardware RAID BIOS? (I've tried to get into touch with Marvell support, no luck)

Thank you for reading and any possible help!