Raid causes system to not boot

[Shadow Wizard]

I am quite new to raid, and have done allot of playing around (Only for a grand sum of 12 hours so far, what a waste.) I have tried everything conceivable. This is what is going on. I have a Dell Poweredge 1800, and in it is a PCI-X 100 MHZ raid card. When the system "hands over control" to that card it tells me that it is a "Poweredge Expandable Raid Controller Bios" When NO arrays are configured, I can boot any CD I like (Hirens, Gparted live, Debian Linux install disk, Diskcopy, the IDE hard drive pulled from another Linux box) no problems. As soon as I configure an array NOTHING will boot. Hirens for example loads the selection menu, and when I make a selection, it hangs with a cursor on the top left of the screen. After a while the system reboots. I know this card works, because just before I started working on it, it had an OS running on it under Raid 5, and the OS booted just fine.
Lil help please. I have been fighting with systems and raid for days and days.. This one for 12 hours total. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get any raid to work properly anywhere.

 

[Dereck47]

The Dell PowerEdge 1800 has 2 PCIe slots and 2 PCIx slots.
Double-check that the card is in one of the PCIx slots.

Also go to the RAID card manufacturer's website and see if there are any compatibility issues with that card and your system; and get a copy of their User's Manual to see if there are any special procedures you have to do in order to set up your RAID array.