This on took me a while to solve. I got a new server from HP a Proliant DL 380 G5. So i went about installing my favorite distro on it gentoo. So far so good until i reached the step to install grub. Grub would not recognize the hard drives on the smart array controller. This is what i did to fix the problem

E dit the file /boot/grub/device.map to look like this

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/cciss/c0d0

Run grub like this:

/sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map --config-file=/boot/grub/grub.conf --no-floppy

grub shell:

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

That’s it your done go compile your kernel or something 🙂