software raid - no grub?

[Graham Seaman <graham@theseamans.net>]

I just bought a new machine and installed the new debian on it. It has 2
drives and I wanted
to run software raid on them so I was really impressed when it came up
as an install option.
The problem is, now I can't always boot: as far as I can work out (after
about 10 attempts,
so it does seem to be fairly consistent) the pattern is that on a reboot
the machine fails to
find the bootloader,  but on a cold  start following power off the
machine does find the
bootloader. Once booted, everything seems to be fine - except that
dmesg  reports
a BIOS problem with pnp.

Googling around tells me that the BIOS warning is probably unrelated and
safe  to ignore,
and that there were historical problems with grub as bootloader on  raid
systems.  Is there
anything I can do about this?  Or should  I  use LILO instead? Or could
I have flaky hardware?

I'm completely new to  raid,  so  any advice  in baby steps, please... :-)

Thanks
Graham