I checked a year ago and couldn't find any, am wondering if anything has changed.

Thanks!

Is this any use to you?
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SataRaid

A quick internet search seems to show that BIOS raid is not very compatible with Linux.

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Thank you for the link to the article. It shows that Linux is capable of doing raid, but installers are unwilling to use it. The internet search shows the same results; The drivers exist, but distributions refuse to use them on install.

I am disappointed, but I am grateful for your response. Thank you Dave.

IIRC there were in the past some problems with Ubuntu's install disk were the solution was to uninstall dmraid before starting the install, so maybe you can try one of those.

I have managed to install Opensuse in the past on a number of different Nvidia fakeraid setups. Mostly Raid10 and Raid 5. These were chipset Raids.

Few things that were tricky...
Booting is an issue, I found that booting from the boot dir was the only way to get it to work. The MBR didn't always work.
With the mirrored type Raids (in my case 10) it used to list the two members of the Raid AND then the mirror too. This used to scare me a bit as if you weren't careful you could install to one of the members of the mirror and not the mirror. I don't know what the result of this would be in reality but it seemed a bit dodgy. I was expecting the bios/chipset raid to be more transparent to the OS.

Rebuilding:
This killed it for me in the end, a few times I had to rebuild the Raids. This worked sometimes. That's not good enough for me. Sometimes is useless. I now either use a proper Raid card, again that can be a bit variable. Or I use mirror software raids and buy more hard drives.

In general I have tried a number of different Raid set ups. The one thing I will say that Opensuse/SUSE is in my experience by far the easiest distro to install into a Raid set up. I don't know why that is. Ubuntu I couldn't convince to detect the Raids, and I had similar issues with Debian. I have used Slackware too. I don't use Fedora/Cent OS or Redhat so I don't know about those.

Cheers,
Phil