Here are some of my experiences with the installation of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition on an old Asus PC with Promise SuperTrak SX6000 RAID Controller. I had two disks connected to the RAID controller.
Installation process went smooth until the point where Grub was supposed to bee installed. At this point I had to continue the installation without bootloader – and of course booting from my disk failed. After searching a bit I found this page describing how to recover after a Windows installation. I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu Desktop Edition and booted from the CD. I followed the guide to the point where I did:
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/root /dev/i2o/hda
This procedure left me with no menu.lst (I guess be course Grub was never installed) in the directory /boot/grub – this one I had to create it manually:
default 0
timeout 5
title Ubuntu Server
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-server root=/dev/i2o/hda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-server
Very simple it seams – and it is – I will spare you the details of my trouble with my disk failure, lack of CPU-power and memory...
In my search for help I also found this page describing how to boot using Grub.