(sorry, txt only version) Problem with brand new Dell Precision R7610 workstation and Fedora 19

[Franki]

Hi all,

I've been asked to set up a Dell R7610 workstation dual booting windows
8 and Fedora 19.

The machine in question has a Xeon E5-2687W with 20MB L2,  128 Gig of
ram, and 4 x 10k hard disk which I've put into a stiped RAID 0 array
using the onboard "Integrated: LSI 2308 6Gb/s SATA, SAS controller that
supports RAID 0, 1, 10"

I successfully installed Windows 8 to the striped array, but I can't get
fedora to install into the 500gig spot I left un-partitioned for it.

Fedora 18 and 19 crash when  you try to install them. (hard disk
errors), saying /dev/root doesn't exist and dropping to dracut, Ubuntu
starts the install process, shows the various drives but doesn't see the
win8 and wants to wipe the lot.

It seems to be a software raid solution and one that Fedora doesn't
support out of box it seems.

Is it going to be possible to get this dual booting with
Fedora19/Windows 8 or should I start shopping for a good hardware Raid
card and start over?

If I do need a new raid card, can anyone recommend a SAS2/SATA3 PCI-e
card?  The dell website for the R7610 lists this card as an option:

LSI 8271-8i 6Gb/s SATA, SAS hardware RAID controller with 1GB onboard
cache supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10

But I'm not familiar with it and don't know how it will work with Fedora
either.

Any thoughts.....  much appreciated.


regards

Frank
UWA