Q: Booting /dev/sda (3ware 7850) fails? Ideas?

[Brian]

Hi guys,

  I'm looked through the archives a bit, but with no luck - I'm having
trouble booting off my 3ware 7850 controller with GRUB (*), and I'd
appreciate any advice anyone has.

  (* Note: This also fails with lilo, so I'm pretty certain this isn't a
GRUB-specific problem, but I'm pursuing this route as well, 'cause it's
driving me batty.)

  I can boot off a diskette, but whenever I try to run off the array
itself, my computer hangs - it doesn't even display the start of a GRUB
loader message.  In fact, it seems to keep trying to poll the floppy.  
(Yes, I do have the 3ware in the boot sequence in BIOS)

  The system details are as follows:
  Tyan Tiger MP motherboard
  3ware 7850 w/ 8 disks in a RAID1+0 setup
  3GB / (root) partition
  RedHat 7.2 (or Mandrake 8.2 Beta 1.. both fail)

  Thoughts?  Also, one thing I intend to try is to remove the other SCSI
(Adaptec 2940) card and see if perhaps that's confusing it.  I'll get to
that tomorrow, but thought I'd check for advice in the meantime....

  Thanks very much,
  - Brian

PS.  The issue, obviously, is not imperative, since I can just use a
floppy or CD image to boot from, but for perfection's sake, I wanted to
use the drive array, if possible.