[CentOS] Dell mirror raid boot problems

[John R Pierce]

Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
>
> I was recently given a Dell raid 386 server that had drives that had
> gone bad.  I replaced the drives with a couple terrabyte sata Seagate
> drives, and set up the bios for a mirrored raid configuration.
>
> I was able to install Centos 5.2 without difficulty, but when it was
> time to perform the 1st boot it went to grub instead of booting off of
> one of the mirrored drives.
>
> I could not figure out how to boot through grub, so I changed the bios
> to look at both drives unmirrored.  At that point I was able to boot to
> one of the drives, and the second drive was not mounted.
>
> The raid logic is within the bios and mother board of the Dell machine.
> Can any of you point me to some literature about making this system work
> as a mirrored raid system.
>   

What model Dell server is this?  Surely, this isn't a 386 (16 to 40mhz 
from circa 1989?!?)     What Dell RAID controller model does it have?  
They are pretty much all called PERC something, but there are many 
generations.      Is this a true raid (controller based, with a battery 
backed write cache), or a bogus soft (fake) raid setup?  if its the 
latter, I'd set it up with linux native raid, and not use the BIOS raid 
at all