FC3 install and grub failure on HP Proliant DL380, kernel issue?

[Sam Hart]

When installing FC3 on an HP Proliant DL380 w/ HP SmartArray 5i
controller grub fails to install successfully (leaving the system unable
to boot). In essence, when Anaconda is nearly finished and gets to the
grub install, grub fails and Anaconda does not report it (instead it
gives you the "Reboot" screen saying installation is complete).

However, by switching the proper console (5, as I recall) you can see
the actual error:
http://hackers.progeny.com/~sam/ZZ-Images/hp_bug.png

As you can see, grub identifies the filesystem type, but cannot actually
read any files from it (there it is failing to read stage1, but I have
verified it can't read any files on the system).

Now, I haven't filed this as a bug in Bugzilla yet because this seems to
be a problem well beyond just FC3. I have verified that other distros
exhibit the same behavior.

Also, I have isolated it down to some sort of kernel issue. In checking
with some custom FC2-based distros, I've verified that the problem only
occurs with kernel versions after 2.6.5. I have tried both stock and
patched Fedora kernels.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Note that if you install FC2
on the machine and then upgrade, everything works except for future Grub
installs ;-) To see the bug the installer must be running on a kernel
newer than 2.6.5.

Since this is not really a FC3 bug, does it even have a place in RH's
bugzilla? FWIW, I would wager that RHEL would have the same problem,
even though I have not verified it myself.

BTW, since this is grub-legacy, I'm yet to find anyone in the grub
community who's willing to diagnose it ;-)

Here are the outputs of dmesg/lspci from the machine after a successful
FC2 install:
http://hackers.progeny.com/~sam/ZZ-Docs/dmesg.out
http://hackers.progeny.com/~sam/ZZ-Docs/lspci.out

-- 
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.O.                                         Sam Hart, sam at progeny.com
..O                                        Progeny Linux Systems, Inc
OOO                                         <http://www.progeny.com/>