[CentOS] Help with Dell PE2950 and RAID5 setup

Wed Mar 7 18:11:24 UTC 2007
Scott Ehrlich <scott at MIT.EDU>

I've got a new PE2950 rack system with PERC controller and 6 drives set up 
contiguously as one RAID5 volume on the PERC controller.

Using 64-bit CentOS 4.4, I partitioned for /boot having 100 Meg, swap 
having 2 gig, and / with the rest (removed LVM).

After the install was complete, the system rebooted and just gave me a 
broken grub prompt (not the graphical Grub boot selector, but grub>).

I fed it root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) and rebooted.

I then got the grub gui, but also got the following after the attempted 
kernel boot:

Decompressing Linux...done.
Booting the kernel.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.8 starting
sda: asking for cache data failed
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: asking for cache data failed
sda: assumint drive cache: write through
EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode 
block - inode=2132343, block=1231234
mount: error 5 mounting none
EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode 
block - inode=123123, block=124324123
EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode 
block - inode=6353565, block=34634635
WARNING: can't access (null)
exec of init ((null)) failed!!!: 14
EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode 
block - inode=1245546546, block=645243235

umount /initrd/dev failed: 5
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


What might be wrong?   Bad hard drive?   This, again, is a fresh install, 
straight off the 64-bit CentOS 4.4 4 CD set.

Thanks.

Scott