[CentOS] Promise FastTrak series

Hello,

In some weeks I'm going to reinstall some old RedHat9 based servers with 
Promise FastTrak TX2000 "semi-hardware" RAID1 controllers. I just tried to 
install CentOS 4.0 on a computer with a spare card and as usual both HDD 
attached to the RAID1 controller are seen separately by the installer 
because the specific driver for the TX2000 wasn't loaded. Nothing new here, 
it was always like this on every distro as far as I know.

Now I googeled a bit and have some questions:

1. In some forums I could read that the FastTrak series in RAID mode wasn't 
supported anymore in the 2.6 kernel (was PDCRAID module in the later 2.4 
kernels).
Quoted apparently from the linux kernel mailing list:
>>In 2.6, Promise software RAID support does not exist. In conversations 
>>with Promise, we all agreed to encourage and support the standard Linux 
>>RAID, md.
So does this mean that I have to use software RAID in linux if I don't want 
to load the drivers provided by Promise (see question 2)?

2. On the other hand Promise provides the partial source code for their 
driver, but there is a silly problem with this...I want to install my OS 
directly on the RAID array :)
So I guess that I would have to:
- Install CentOS on another computer, compile the driver provided by 
Promise, make a driver disk (don't ask me how).
- Boot CentOS on the server with the controller and type "linux dd" to load 
this driver disk.
- Pray and correct bugs for the next 2 weeks.
Is this the right way to go?

Any feedback with FastTrak TX2000 or TX4000 controllers would be very 
welcome, let me know which solution you choosed.

Thanks
Steven