I have three PowerEdge 2550 servers that work great when the SCSI adapter is set up as SCSI in BIOS. As soon as any of them are configured to use RAID in BIOS they hang for several minutes on the message:

Waiting for Array Controller #0 to Start

After several minutes the following message appears:

Controller Monitor Failed
Array Controller failed to Start.
BIOS not installed

I have six drives that I have tried in various combinations with no success. All of the drives work perfectly in SCSI mode no matter which server I put them in. The only apparent way to get a different result is to remove all drives. This results in the adapter reporting that it POSTed successfully, but no drives were found and "BIOS not installed".

I have tried all the basics... restart the systems a thousand and one times (slight exaggeration here), try the drives in every conceivable combination, checked all connectors, remove and reseat the RAID Key and DIMM (after unplugging the battery pack of course) and updated BIOS to A09 and flash the PERC 3/di up to v2.8.1.6098 Rev.A10.

It seems there must be some configuration issue that I am unaware of since this problem is identical across three different servers, all of which work perfectly as soon as they are switched from RAID mode to SCSI mode.

Hope someone can help with this and thanks in advance for any efforts made.