Well here we go; I'm going to detail the unpleasant experience of setting up our new server as best as I can remember it.
Problem 1: Floppy disk with drivers needed for RAID functionality. We actually had a floppy drive, and even a computer to connect it to, but no floppy disks could be found. So we drove a couple miles to someone's house and found one floppy--and old Intel motherboard driver disk. We fired up the ancient computer there, put the disk in, put the CD-ROM from Asus in the optical drive...and got stuck. It wouldn't read the disk. Closer examination revealed that it was actually a DVD disk, which the 5+ year old computer couldn't read. We took the floppy home and made the disk there.
Problem 2: Getting the computer to boot correctly. Having not dealt with a floppy drive for several years, we were both unfamiliar with the cause of those cryptic "failure to find boot disk" messages, which were very vexing. We initially blamed it on the RAID and how that fit into the boot order.
Problem 3: Not having disk 2. Server 2003 64-bit comes on two CDs. We had 2 MSDN-iso burned disks, one labeled disk 1 and one labeled disk 2. The second one was most certainly not disk 2. Off to MSDN to download...and in the meantime we went ahead and installed updates and Service Pack 2.
Problem 4: We ran disk 2, only to get a warning that Service Pack 2 had already been installed. We proceeded on anyways. Around this time we started getting random lockups. Then a message popped up detailing that the RAID had entered a degraded state. After messing around in the RAID software for a couple minutes, we decided that one of the drives was bad, and that we would have to reinstall on a RAID composed of the three remaining disks.
Problem 5: Windows installed again, everything updated, RAID fails again. So this time I backed up an image of everything we had setup to another computer, re-installed Windows on one of the SATA HDDs (not in a RAID) and restored from the backup. This seemed to work alright, until we started to have a LOT of problems installing Exchange Server 2007.
So we re-installed again (fourth time if you're counting). By now I figured that something was up and these disks weren't actually failing. But we were also sick of the RAID idea so just installed Windows on a spare IDE HDD we had laying around. In the meantime, we figured out that the disks probably hadn't been given adequate time to rebuild (although I'm still not sure why a new RAID with empty disks needs to be built).
This is the install we are currently running on, and it's working quite well. After the RAID was given time to build (I went into the BIOS RAID control panel and told it to rebuild) it has been running fine. We had quite a lot of trouble again with Exchange Server 2007, but that is another story altogether...