3Ware 9500 install issues

[reeses1@comcast.net]

Greetings:

I have a machine that I'm trying to install Debian onto.  The hardware consists of:

Tyan K8WE Motherboard
(2) Opteron 270 CPUs
4GB memory
3Ware 9500S with 4(RAID5) HDs

The driver for the 3Ware card (3w-9xxx) isn't loaded by the installer, so there is no device /dev/sda to install onto.  Using the second virtual console to manually load the 3w-9xxx driver doesn't help.  The driver loads correctly, but it doesn't detect the disk array.  This behavior occurs with the Beta 2 Etch netboot image, and with the nightly build also.  The Sarge image doesn't work either, but it fails even earlier in the process.

I thought that perhaps some of the drivers that were getting loaded were interfering with the operation of the 3w-9xxx driver, so I tried the install in expert mode and didn't let the installer load all of those ide chipset drivers, but it didn't help.  I tried a PXE network install so that I could load no IDE drivers, but no dice either. 

I don't know if it is a problem with this particular kernel version or what.  I tried the Ubuntu 5.10 live CD which has 2.6.12, and it is able to load the 3w-9xxx driver and see /dev/sda properly.

After loading the driver manually, dmesg reports that version 2.26.02.004 is loaded.

Can anyone offer any insight?

Thanks.