3ware raid - custom rescue floppy?

[aphro@portal.aphroland.org]

hi

i recieved 3 new systems today ..i was unaware of their
(lack) of design until i opened the case. they are
1U IDE raid systems from some company called 'pogolinux'.
the problem is there is 4 drives, and ALL of them are on
the raid controller(3ware). since i am not gonna
be using redhat on these systems, i need to figure out
the best way to replace the kernel on the rescue
disk for debian so it will recognize the drives. either
that or i return the systems.  I can take care of the
compiling kernel and stuff no problem just would like to
know if there is a way to replace the kernel image.
last time i checked, when i mounted the rescue disk
all it was was a bunch of files, so could i just copy
my new kernel on top of the old one?(don't need to 
worry about modules i won't be using any at first, everything
will be statically built). or is there something more
to it. last time i created a boot disk with kernel-package
it seemed to be a rather inflexable boot disk(didn't have
lilo, or at least didn't have it configured so i could do
other things with it, it would just boot without prompting)
i really don't like the idea of having the OS on raid
especially because we will be running them in raid0,
that would indeed suck to have the OS itself go down
because of a storage drive dieing.

any help would be appreciated.

thanks!

nate