I just built the following system:
Asus A8N-CSM
512MB Corsair XMS
A64 3500+
Areca ARC-1210 RAID 5 controller
4x 320GB Seagate 7200.10 HDs in RAID 5
Hauppauge PVR-500 tuner

This system is intended to be a MythTV backend and fileserver. I chose FC4 because there is a detailed guide for setting up MythTV. FC4 installed easily after I gave it the driver disk for the RAID card. When the system came up it was stable, but the onboard network card didn't work. After some research I determined this mobo wasn't fully supported until later Linux kernels. I stuck in an old network card I new worked with Linux and then did a 'yum upgrade'. When the system tried to boot the next time I got the error below. The bootloader still has the older kernel listed and I can boot fine into it. Any ideas as to what caused this?

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Booting 'Fedora Core (2.6.17-1/2142_FC4)'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is extfs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
[Linux-bzimage, setup=ox1e00, size=0x1b659c]
initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4.img
[Linux-initrd @ 0x1de88000, 0x127db4 bytes]

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area is not E820-reserved
PCE: Not using MMConfig.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.15 starting
mkrootdev: label / not found
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!: 2
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 0
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 1
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 2
switchroot: mount failed: 22
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
------------------------------------------

You don't have the correct drivers built into the new kernel or the new kernel isn't loading drivers for your raid card. My suggestion is to just make the leap to fedora core 5 as it's kernels by default have the latest and greatest drivers already built in :-)

fyi, this is a common error that CentOS/RHEL users see since those distro's run very old kernels.

Hope that helps!

-Scott

Just for clarification, does that mean the old kernel pulled the drivers off the raid card CD?
If so is there any way of getting them to any new kernel?

When I installed I supplied the RAID drivers from a floppy. Isn't Yum supposed to handle them for the new kernel? If not how does Yum ever work for a kernel upgrade?

I originally was going to go with FC 5, but there are only drivers for the RAID card for up to FC4 and I wasn't sure if they would be compatible. I saw one post saying they were up to a certain kernel.

Also, I initially tried FC5 x64 and the RAID card was not automatically detected.

Not sure about this at all, but you did a yum upgrade, I normally do a yum update. man yum says the only difference is that upgrade ignores obsoletes, I'm not sure what that means. but as a very long shot may be worth uninstalling the latest kernel and trying again with yum update.

Not sure if yum checks what's in the old kernel or not, I have a feeling it doesn't. If you've loaded special stuff in the old you probably have to do the same to the new.

Drivers are normally built into the kernel hence when yum updates the kernel all supported drivers are updated. You are probably going to have to make sure the new kernel is loading your driver.

-Scott