What seems to be the problem?

Eric - is this a supported config?

If he goes and does this work around and calls into tech support will they support technical issues?

We will support RHEL 3 SW RAID if RHEL 3 was sold with the server.  This customer was running FC2, so technical support wouldn't be an option.

I'm actually in a similar situation.

What is the policy on Hardware RAID? We bought a 1425SC with the hardware RAID and no OS. However, we purchased RHEL 3 ourselves, but found we could not install RHEL 3 when we had the drives in a RAID configuration.

Alternately, do you know if there are any planned driver updates which would allow us to install with the on-board hardware RAID? (I assume the lack of a driver is the reason why RHEL 3 cannot detected the RAID. We previously were capable of SATA RAID using RHEL 3, but our previous machine used a add-on card for the RAID controller.

Which release of RHEL 3 did you install?  If you used the base version, try downloading and using the U4 version from RHN.

Our first attempt was with RH EL 3 Update 2.

But when that one didn't recognize the RAID, we downloaded RH EL 3 Update 4, but the same difficulty emerged. During installation, the installer detected both hard drives as separate entities rather than as a single RAID 1 entity.

I think our problem just comes down to needing a driver for the onboard SATA RAID. So, it's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, we broke down and bought a different server with a PCI SATA RAID card instead. We'll repurpose the 1425 for Windows use instead.